


The Wooden Soldiers

by whitesilverandmercury



Series: When We See the Sea [2]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon, Canon Universe, M/M, TW: Blood, following the manga, it's not gruesome it's just snk canon, tw: moderate gore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-03-12 22:29:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13556916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitesilverandmercury/pseuds/whitesilverandmercury
Summary: It is very hard to work with someone you’re having sex with. It’s even harder to work with someone you’re in love with. Eren never asked to be the hero; and Jean knows it is impossible to chase the sun.// erejean, canon, part two ofwhen we see the seaseries; follows the manga





	1. the wooden soldiers

**Author's Note:**

> AT LONG LAST, i return after a bout of mania 60K words in 3 weeks to explorations in canon that may or may not include sweet good night kisses, teenage angst sharpened by war, rolling around in wildgrass, the sort of sexual tension that comes when no one knows if tomorrow is real, world-building within the canon universe, following the manga closely but not scene by scene (fml that would suck) 
> 
> listen to **nothing but thieves** _holding out for a hero_ cover **mumford & sons** _thistle and weeds_ here on the [fic playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/12169251584/playlist/2OZGUINyfg1GaXNij4rlQ7?si=JMm9UXwtTIW4HtEHvQ2R3g); see end of chapter for some notes!

 PART TWO | THE WOODEN SOLDIERS

i. THE WOODEN SOLDIERS 

* * *

_104 th Southern Training Division, year 850_.

“You still use your old _valenkii_ boots?” Jean teases, a little catlike side glance and that cool guy smirk of his, just short of tongue between the teeth.

Seated on the veranda of the East C Dormitory, Eren pouts up at him darkly without lifting his chin, using hooked fingers to wedge rubber sole on over felt boot. “Yeah, so?” he mumbles, tapping his toe against the faded wood as he climbs to stand again. “Too Shiganshina bumpkin for you, pretty boy?”

Jean shakes his head, turning before his smile softens too much with Eren looking. Eren still sees it, catches the shadow of it. Jean shrugs so that the long sleeves of his ribbed sweater fall to his knuckles again, bunching up as he slips half his hands into his pockets. Eren’s eyes linger on the shape of him, fit white denim and tall standard issue boots. The way his sweater slouches at his firm hips, strong legs …

“Stop checking me out,” Jean says as he hops down off the dorm veranda and the nipping wind of a late spring in the mountains strokes through his ash blond hair. Maybe he means it. Maybe he doesn’t. They never know who is watching for flags of fraternization. It’s no secret cadets _fraternize_ ; it’s human nature and it’s soldier nature. But better not to give instructors reason to stop pretending they don’t know.

Strangely, as they draw closer to disbanding — only five months from now — they are allowed more leisure time than before. Drills are a bit more intense, but it’s almost as if Shadis believes in well-earned and well-deserved recreational reprieve for last-years after what seems eternity of grueling training. That, or he knows it’s the last glimpses of normalcy they may ever enjoy. Better not to think on that.

A mountain spring is wet and chilly, but not without sunshine. It pries against the mud of the grounds, hard-packed in the morning only to soften up again by mid-afternoon. The smell of the pines is crisp, the air in a deep breath cool and purifying. It is too muddy to sneak out into the fields, and cleaning horseshoes after taking any of the mares out this time of year is more a punishment than a simple chore. That’s okay; Sasha loves it. So the horses get the care and attention they need between exercises.

They hike up where the training grounds slopes suddenly not into rock and cliff face, but into the foothills of the modest mountain, where boulders hide under blankets of moss and clustered trees, pine cones crumble soggy underfoot and forest critters scramble away into ferns and underbrush. Up an easy enough hike, a little stream cascades over a collapse of mountain stone, whispers crystalline and gentle. The trees part for the sun to bleach the place warm. An old wool blanket flapped out along the rocks is the perfect place to bask on days like this. Just get away. Get away and quiet.

With tiny splashes, Eren cleans mud off the soles of his galoshes, felt boots and wool socks laid out to soak up the sun. The light scintillates and jumps off the gliding water. Across the way on the other bank, catching the sunlight in silky petals, is a distinct circle of perky blue irises.

“Oh — ” Eren shakes off the first clean galosh, thumps it on a rock for good measure. Droplets of water bounce. “Jean. Look.”

Jean obeys, nonchalantly, looks over from where he lounges on the blanket with one arm folded behind his head and a knee drawn up against covered rock. “What?” he grunts.

“Over there.” Eren gestures with the clean shoe. “It’s a faerie ring.”

“A faerie ring.”

“Yeah. The circle of flowers — you know, like in the story of Nemo and Hylios?” 

Jean’s brow knots. Eren’s knots, too.

“You know the story of Nemo and Hylios, right … ?”

“I think so,” Jean says after a moment.

“Before the walls were built, Nemo and Hylios. The lovers that fought the titans?”

“They were just close childhood friends.”

“Splitting hairs. Everyone knows they were fucking.”

Jean utters a dainty little scoff, but he does not argue. “Okay, right. I remember now,” he surrenders the fib of ignorance. “Hylios the youthful king and Nemo the general, fated to die brutally on the battlefield together.”

Eren falls still, brisk mountain water biting his fingers as he cleans the other galosh. He knows that tone of voice, Jean the cynic, Jean _The MP is so much better_ Kirschtein.

The soft blue petals of the flowers shiver in the sunlight, in the spring breeze.

“That’s one way to put it,” Eren grumbles, flashing Jean a glance over his shoulder. “The soldiers didn’t want to fight anymore because Hylios was injured, so Nemo wore Hylios’ armor and got them all to fight again. Then Hylios came out, even though he was wounded, and they died together victorious killing the last titan on the field.”

“One way to put it,” Jean echoes in a faint murmur, hazel eyes slipping away.

Eren smacks the galoshes down by his socks to air dry, mildly impatient with Jean’s disparaging indifference on a day like today. “And then the Mercies surrounded the spot where they died in a circle of irises, and whenever you see one, you’re supposed to honor the heroes by sitting inside and telling the truth.”

“That’s ironic, since they lied about who was who.”

Eren scowls at him over his shoulder — then lights in a smile. “You wanna go do it? Sit inside and tell the truth?”

Jean hesitates, just enough to notice. Pinch of the brow, little smirk. “Yeah, no thanks.”

The smile falls. “Fine,” Eren grumbles, petulantly. “Your secrets are probably lame and snotty, anyway.”

Jean rolls his eyes.

For a moment, there’s only the idle chatter of the stream, the distant sounds of the woods around them — just alive enough, falling twigs, rustling animals, drops of leftover dew.

Finally Eren stands, pants rolled half up his calves; he jumps from one rock to another before climbing up to the blanket on the small swell of grass just above the water. Jean shifts to give him some room on the blanket, but Eren crawls on top of him, fully on top of him, pretzeling their bodies together with straddling knees and head jammed in the nook between Jean’s cheek and shoulder. “Ow,” Jean grunts at an elbow, an accidental jab of the knee. He does not complain otherwise. Just wraps his arms around Eren to trap him there, tight squeeze and clasp of the hands on opposite arms.

Eren listens to the forest around them a little, listens to the smooth rhythm of Jean’s breath, the steady thud of his heart. He shifts, slides off to nestle into Jean’s side, angles his face so that his lips dust the shell of Jean’s ear as he whispers, “I mean, how crazy is it they fought the titans with only spears and vaulting and stuff?”

“Oh my God … it’s a folk tale, Eren, it’s … never mind.” Jean sighs as he folds one arm beneath his head, his free hand swirling circles and idle arabesques along the stretch of Eren’s neck. It’s fine. Eren hears the echo of his smile. 

***

September.

The Official 104th Disbanding Ceremony has the streets of Trost all done up and ready to party.

Three hundred and fifty military cadets march.

“We have paid a terrible price for our century of peace! Even as we speak, there’s a chance the Colossal Titan might tear down Wall Rose and come at us at any second! When that time comes, it will be your duty to oppose the Titan threat! You will sacrifice your all!”

Three hundred and fifty military cadets salute.

“ _Sir!_ ”

Mikasa Ackerman, Reiner Braun, Berthold Fubar, Annie Leonhardt, Eren Jäger, Jean Kirschtein, Marco Bodt, Conny Springer, Sasha Braus, Christa Lenz — _the top ten graduates_.

Three hundred and fifty military cadets stand at attention.

They have made it. It’s humanity’s time, now. Mankind will feast upon the titans.

“Tomorrow you will apply for your branch of choice! Today marks the disbanding of the 104th Training. On to the ceremony!”

“ _Sir!_ ”

The Walls loom in the distance. Great, august, mythical Walls.

It’s no Jour des Morts procession or Koliada season, but lamps of Trost city hall bob like captured stars in the night, streamers and banners wave in the cobbled streets — greens, blues, silver, reds, the military colors. The Survey Corps is out on expedition but high officials of the other two branches are in town for tomorrow’s recruitment; they are enjoying their own galas in the ornamented mansions of bankers and lawyers and Estate nobles while the recently-graduated soldiers celebrate in city hall. Weird, to have heroes and role models so close yet so far.

Everyone, in their nicest clothes, drinking way too much way too fast — beer, hot spiced wine, liquor distilled from fermented potatoes. There is roast joint, sweet fruits, and cheese and bread with fresh jams, spiced butter. The Reeves company knows how to garner good favor. The windows hang open for the cool night breeze; singing echoes down the curving streets. In city hall, everyone is talking. Stories are being told. Nostalgia is contagious. Praise is given; friendly heckles echo; celebration resounds and pride and tipsy triumph rise to the ceiling. This is a grand night, a night to revel. They are all starry-eyed and fresh. This is the night to end one chapter of their lives and begin a new one. Someone is playing music. People are drunk and dancing. Nobody wants to admit that they might never see each other again, friends and lovers and comrades.

And like that night that feels so long ago in the West A Dormitory, when Conny played his little folk guitar and Mina had her tambourine, in a warm corner of city hall they cluster. Conny and his _barbitos_ ; Mina and Christa doing the palm-to-palm; Armin laughing, laughing with Berthold. There is laughter and shouting. Music, fast and exciting. Lights, shivering. Armin pulls Mikasa into the Southern Czarl’ston, and she twirls and he stomps. They are in a circle; the center of the circle is like a forest clearing, and as the music cries, friends and almost-soldiers jump in and out. Dancing, dancing. Whistles, shouts, laughter. Elbows hooked, fast footwork, turning, turning …

And somewhere in the rush and the sway of it all, one of the dark passages not too far from city hall’s portico, one of Trost’s winding stone side streets — footsteps pounding on hollow wooden veranda. Fall of moonlight in slants through the rooftops, where the lanterns can’t catch it. Shuffle of feet. Iron sconces. Iron sconces. Iron. Like the taste on the back of Jean’s tongue, the metal surge of nervousness and ecstasy, because he _is_ still nervous at times when he pulls Eren’s tongue into his mouth with his own, warm and twisting, nudging beyond teeth. Little purr of a helpless moan, stuttering out like a flame in Eren’s throat. Eren is fire himself, burning inside for the moment, Jean can feel it in the heat of his body as it presses against his. They kiss feverishly in the shadows, biting down on sneaky drink-sweet giggles, fingers tangling into each other, tangling into clothes, tangling into hair. Eren folds against him, breathless and sweaty, heart still pounding from dancing. Jean tightens his arms on him so he can’t get away, a trapped animal wriggling and laughing. Dance of his eyelashes on his flushed cheeks. Blaze of his glance. Blaze of his _smile_ , God damn his smile, laughing, laughing together, better get back before anyone notices they’re gone, sneaking around is like the thrill of the hunt —

That is what should have happened.

It did not.

They saw Jean’s mom. They drank too much and they argued. It’s ending. They both know it’s ending, and maybe that’s why they fight. After recruitment, the cards will be dealt. Eren will be worlds away in the Survey Corps. And Jean will be deep within the interior.

When Jean was small, his father bought him hand-carved wooden soldiers. Solid like a chess piece, about as tall as his index finger is long, smooth, sometimes painted. Sometimes lacquered. Little flecks of muddy yellow, fake gold in the place of pin-hole eyes, off-kilter smiles. Unicorn of the Military Police carved thin into their backs. They were strong, durable. Never broke when he dropped them. Made pleasant thunking sounds when he tapped them across the table.

One fell in the fire, once. During a remarkably cold Trost winter, when ice laced the windows and the rain kept the world grey and soggy, slushy, too much for little rubber wellies and wool socks to handle, so his mother said, _Jean-bo, let’s play inside this afternoon_. And Jean wished she’d let him go out in the cold to play with the neighbors, but then he didn’t, because he liked being in the warm, quiet house with her.

The wooden soldier fell in under the brick mantle and Jean had watched in horror as slowly, slowly, a cocoon of sparks and licking fire swallowed it up. Charred its smile, its folded arms, crumbled its poke of a bayonet faster than it could eat its blocky limbs.

That’s what they are, isn’t it? All three hundred and fifty of them.  

And even wooden soldiers carved solid and strong go up in flames. 

***

 _Things were not meant to be this way_ — _I am not who I was five years ago_ — _I’ve been training like hell_ — _hot_ — _so hot_ —

“With great losses … not going to hide anything from you … the probability of new recruits dying … ”

_Momma! Mom! Help me! Fuck! Fuck!_

“Most of those who decide to stay here … will probably be dead soon.”

 _Fuck it! I’m not giving up! I’ll erase them from this world! I’ll kill them all to the last_ —

“ — so, will you be able die if you’re so ordered?”

Commander Erwin Smith’s voice bounces around the pseudo amphitheatre, swallows a field full of shaken and scarred three-day-old soldiers in the torch-lit night.

And Eren chokes on a breath, blinks to refocus. He stands stage right of the banners and drapes and Commander Smith’s broad shoulders. Sequestered there in the wing by green cloaks. Like they don’t want him to be seen. Like maybe he’ll sway decisions if he’s seen. The _monster_. The _trump card_. It feels as though something has cinched around his chest, tight, and hot, even though he feels cold inside. He has felt cold inside since they led him from the courtroom. A little warmer, when he’d seen Armin and Mikasa in the crowd there at the trial. But then they’d ripped them away from him again, and it was back to the chill coiled up inside. Hollow. Hollow and sick.

Sick with nerves — jumpy, and unsure. The last time he felt this way was that night with his father in the forest. God, where is he now? Is he still alive? Has he heard about him? Hollow because _Momma!_ and sick because if his father _has_ heard about him, why hasn’t he come for him by now — ?

It is too dark out to see who remains on the field below the stage. But Commander Smith seems pleased by the results. Beside Eren in the shadows of the curtains, Captain Levi stirs with a short little breath like a sigh through his nose, his arms folded below his thick green cloak.

“Let’s head back,” he mutters, and it is to the others around him, as if Eren does not even exist. Yet his grey-blue eyes flicker over him quickly. Appraising, still. Indifferent only because the curiosity seems bland and bored. _You know_ , he’d said in the courtroom, cleaning off the toe of his boot. _The fact that he possesses intelligence could one day spell serious trouble for you, if he for some reason decided to oppose the military_ … _you might not recall, but he took out at least twenty titans while in his, uh, altered state_.

Head back, back to the small old castle on the other side of Wall Rose from Trost District. Back to the musty stone and dark wooden beams, cold dusty chandeliers of iron and stale, caked candle wax. 

 _Monster_.

“Yes, sir,” Eren murmurs, but it doesn’t really matter because Captain Levi has already turned and started away, and it is Squad Leader Hanji who slings an arm around Eren’s shoulders like they’re friends.

***

The world ended, and Jean will remember it in flashes.

It starts with a strike of lightning and an earth-shattering _boom_ , a whistle in the air as a massive chunk of Wall Rose crashes like a meteorite into the streets of Trost.

Bells clang wildly. People flood the streets laden with all the belongings they can juggle but the soldiers are yelling at them —

“Leave all material possessions behind! Evacuation is first priority! Evacuate calmly!”

Panicked civilians clog the streets. Tripping, shoving, grouping, grabbing. Garrison and MP struggle and fail to maintain order. People are screaming. Nameless faces, strangers blurring by, smear of military tan.

“Evacuation is in progress! Evacuate calmly, please!”

Wall Rose, breached.

Jean will never forget the look on Eren’s face as the chaos broke out. Noise. Everywhere, noise. People running. Soldiers taking off. People shrieking. The bells are all Jean can hear for a moment. The bells, the bells … _Death_. Like that one nursery rhyme. _Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Hemmond’s! When I grow rich, say the bells of Gulwych. Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head!_ That morning he had fresh coffee with his breakfast — _fresh coffee_ — smooth and black, notes of citrus in the steam, and a day-old croissant but croissants are somehow just as good when they’re a little cold and flaky. That morning Jean never meant to avoid Eren but he did anyway, because he needed to cool his head, he needed some space, he went for a walk through the early-morning markets of Trost, showing Marco where he and his mother had worked a produce stand three years ago, before he’d signed up for the 104th. That morning Jean had reported to headquarters in starched uniform and he’d thought hey, know what, this is a new day, this is a big day, this is an important day, things are going to get better, things are changing, things will be okay, and the look on Eren’s face is seared into him like the shape of his mouth or the branding iron of his words.

Eren, in front of him as the bells cry out, and somewhere in the distance the first cannons go off at lumbering wasteland titans drawn to the broken gate.

Eren is Jean’s weakness but Jean’s ears are ringing and he says, “Move — ” as he breezes by because he needs to get inside and get his gear. The wall has been breached. The titans are advancing. He has a duty to uphold. He is a soldier. _He is a soldier_.

Eren’s fingers bruise as they close on his arm.

“ _Hey_ ,” Eren snaps, voice low. Like there’s really time for a private conversation right now. The world is ending. It is ending to the deafening beat of Jean’s heart and the sun is still shining. And “Hey,” Eren says, “what the hell’s gotten into you?” 

Eren, sweet lustrous Eren, with that mess of dark hair begging to have fingers run through it and those blazing amber eyes bearing all the glory and brilliance of his unhinged soul, that smooth sun-kissed face and lovely neck diving deep into the collar of his trainee jacket — hickey, Jean left that hickey — that cupid-bow mouth hanging open is the same one Jean moaned into last night in his old room and he knows the shape and taste of it by heart like the twist of Eren’s fingers in his, but —

 _You’re not the point of my life_ , Eren said to him.

Something in Jean snaps and he jerks out of Eren’s grip. “What’s gotten into me?” he echoes, appalled. “I don’t need to hear that from you right now! _You_ wanted to join the Corps, this is probably like some fucked up wet dream of yours, isn’t it? You’re good and ready to die any second now that the wall’s been compromised — ”

The fault lines running in lace-like cracks up and down Jean’s shell give way and everything is shifting, everything is breaking, crumbling. He is spewing words he knows are wrong but they feel so good to say.

“I was supposed to leave for the interior tomorrow!” he seethes, like this is all somehow Eren’s fault. It’s not. “Now what do I get to do? Sit back, relax, and die — just like _you_ want to — ”

Something flashes in Eren’s eyes. His hands fly out. He shoves Jean up against a column of the arcades hard enough to knock loose some of Jean’s regressive panic.

“ _Hell no!_ ” Eren growls, and Jean can see the hero in him more blindingly than ever before.

“Don’t forget,” Eren fumes, voice shaking, but cold. Trembling, but vicious. He is so close, Jean could kiss him. But Jean does not kiss him. This feels more like a threat than a pep talk. This is so purely Eren. “Are you fucking kidding me? Did you suddenly forget the three years we just poured our blood, sweat, and tears into?”

Jean is confused for a moment. Does he mean training, or _them_?

“We’ve nearly died so many times over the past three years,” Eren grits out through his teeth, his eyes burning right through each of Jean’s practiced defenses. He’s got his fingers fisted in Jean’s lapel; his elbow digs into Jean’s shoulder. Oh, the raw rough romance of boys and men. Oh, remember when they used to dance together up in the mountain camp, during rec hours and free time —

“Some people actually _did_ die,” Eren reminds in an impatient hiss. “Some ran away, others were kicked out. But we made it! We survived!”

Using that word feels like invoking the power of some unknown god. _Survived_. Survival. _Survive_.

“Right?” Eren is still frenzied in his invective. He is searching for Jean’s eyes. He is so familiar and so far away from Jean in this defining moment. “We made it! And we can do the same now because this is all we’ve been training for!”

People are staring.

Eren’s voice drops, thickens, he is talking to just Jean now, just Jean, and this is no show. This is _him_.

“You’re going to survive this day,” he rattles out on a fragile whisper, and suddenly Jean isn’t sure whether Eren is going to snap or shatter into tears; he is riding the line of insanity that tightly. _You’re going to survive_. The passion radiates off him like a fever. Frantic. _I want you to survive_. “And you’ll go to the interior tomorrow as part of the MP. Right?”

Bells, bells, someone’s bawling. Another loud thunderclap of the cannons, distant shrill whistle.

 _God_ does Jean want to kiss him for fear of never kissing again. This is like that Day Mission, almost two years ago — their first kiss all over again in the rain and the pines. There is a folk song stuck in his head. _Plant hope with good seeds, don’t get buried in thistle and weeds_ … He can’t kiss him. Everyone is around.

“ _Shit_ ,” Jean spits, ripping his eyes away before Eren’s swallow him whole. He jerks out of Eren’s hot grip and rounds the corner, brushing past Mikasa.

But it’s done.

It’s fired in him: burning _resolve_.

He will survive this — not to emulate Eren, but to turn around and say, “It wasn’t because of you, I would have survived whether you slapped some sense back into me or not,” as he kisses him in reunion. And Eren will understand. Eren always somehow understands even when he shouldn’t. Makes him want to be better and try harder when all he wants to do is be comfortable. Jean is furious with his fire because it enervates him the same it emboldens him, the wildness of his primal and inviolable soul.

“Let’s go, Daz,” Jean barks as he leaves. “How long are you gonna keep crying?”

The world ends.

_Boom. Boom!_

There were titans in the city Jean knows and loves.

Clammy hands tight on trigger holts. Charged with cold, electric adrenaline. Half hate and half fear. Tasted like metal on his tongue. The air was smoky and rancid with the greasy stench of decaying titans. Soldiers, swatted out of the air like pesky flies and broken bodies smashed to the pavement and stone, bursting like berries. The bells stopped ringing.

 _Fire! Fire!_ echoed from the walls. It was useless. The titans were in the city already. And they were tearing the world to bloody, sinewy shreds. _Pop! Pop!_ Hiss of piston wire and sputtering gas. Headquarters never looked so far away.

“Now! While they’re distracted! Let’s go, before we run out of gas!”

Flashes.

At his signal, how many of his friends and comrades did Jean lead to their deaths?

 _Fallen bravely in the line of duty_ …

Everything in flashes.

A wild, resounding shriek in the broken, smoldering streets. It shivered on the wind it created. Deafening. Inhuman. The rotation of the earth grinding to a halt, though the world, out of spite perhaps, kept spinning.

“It’s killing the others! We led it here — ”

Flashes.

“I think letting it rage against them is our only chance!”

Flintlock rifles, scattershot, right in the glossy, gummy, oversized eyes of titans.

Everything, flashes.

They are on the roof. The rogue titan with the gnashing teeth and long tangled hair falls. It begins to decompose, letting off that steam. Distinctly less foul, sweet, almost, sweet and metallic like a coin warmed in the palm. The flesh melts away like ribbons of wax and there is something in the nape of the blackened gorge. Pale, fragile, tinier even than the giant ribs crumbling to ash and dust around it, it’s clearly a person and it’s fused somehow with the muscle, the ligaments.

Mikasa is on the ground in a flash.

She catches this person as the degenerating corpse releases him. She heaves him out of the monstrous mess. She holds him to her chest and rocks back and forth and her wails of relief echo around the bleak, evacuated city. Because, from the massive, steaming corpse, it’s _Eren_ she’s just pulled.

Jean knows that silhouette. He knows the shape of that figure, every curve and angle of it.

He knows it in the dark of the West C Dormitory, in the lines of cadets at attention on training grounds.

Knows it through the steam and the gore.

Knows it standing atop the wall in ash-peppered sunlight, guarded by Commander Pixis.

Knows it in a cluster of deep green cloaks, wings of freedom embroidered on the backs, outside a Survey Corps fort.  

 _Eren_.

***

It has been one month since less than five percent of 104th graduates joined the Survey Corps.

One month since Jean looked at him in the thin crowd of them, outside the Survey Corps expeditionary troops fort and its crumbling, rain-stained stone, on the other side of the Wall from Trost District, to which the Military Police now take their time arriving from the comfort of the interior — looked at Eren and said more like blame than a pledge, “This is real now. Your life has weight against _everyone_ who sacrificed for it. Don’t fucking forget that. That’s all I’m asking. _Please_.”

And his presence had been bruised and bleak, numb grief manifest as a winter day in his soul — bitter chill and hollow drear, the wind scraping life out of skeletal trees and decayed leaves under a heavy grey sky. Yes, a cold bitterness in his glances critical, pointed, deliberate, carving Eren raw inside. Not hatred but something close, albeit altogether colder and more painful: forthright and helpless forgiveness. His feelings, deadened and gone. Something in him on the retreat, hastening to put up walls around itself after learning its lesson about longing to be free.

And it is Eren’s fault.

It has been one month of glances around the old castle not so much stolen as proffered wearily, over early morning chasing the few hens in the yard away from the coop to retrieve any egg of any size to break over oatmeal in the small dining hall before training for new recruits whisked familiar faces off all day long and familiarizing faces distracted Eren with their smiles and jokes and laughter — Petra, Eld, Auruo, Gunther, the Captain, the Squad Leader. A month of late nights in rushlight to preserve lamp oil and wax in the renewed rage of wartime ration, of sleeping quarters at opposite ends of the dim stone world of the fort, of stars spinning out over parapet and gatehouse and faces of friends so close but so distant like ships passing in the night —

One month and then the groaning of the Trost District outer gate, opening like the hungry maw of a giant man-eater, gulping them up into the danger that awaits in a walled-in wasteland.  

It was like a fever dream.

The thunder of horse hooves, the crack and hiss of flares, the earth-pound of massive bare feet running heel to toe. The enormous female one, she sprints, slowed to a degree by her immensity, wind resistance and gravity — another horror like the Armored, the Colossal. She has sentience and purpose and wits, body turned inside out like the Colossal, gleaming glistening pinks and reds and yellows of muscle and tendon.

The sweet smell in the cool, susurrating shadows of the oversized fir forest dazes Eren at first. Rush of the world in his ears as they gallop between looming trunks and branches, over fern and pine cones, mossy stumps, rustling leaves. Everything suddenly small and faraway as second-guessing paralyzes him, white knuckling the reins of his horse. As he forgets to breathe. As everyone, these new wonderful comrades, who do not fear him, and who trust him, who sat with him over dinner, who told him stories of their childhood and training days, who welcomed him into inside jokes and whispering conversations, who patted his back like a father and stroked hair from his eyes and tried to freshen up the musty refectory with clusters of sweet briar buds like a mother and elbowed him teasingly or bickered with him like a brother — who said he could do it, he is good enough, he needs to do it, he needs to make a motherfucking choice, and the taste of metal was thick and red on his tongue and —

It will be the Jour des Morts holiday soon.

Gods know there are plenty dead loved ones to celebrate this year, dolls strung up _in memoriam_ like fallen comrades strung up bloody and broken in the trees. Trees towering watchful and uncaring of the tragedies in their branches. Ancient and indifferent to choices and regrets. To pounding three-flank formations of horses and soldiers, and monstrous hands and snapped bones and blood drifting like petals on a spring wind once more. 

Eren’s soul is worn thin.

The stab of betrayal is a feeling like being ripped apart from the inside, a gaping cold ache. _Guilt_ , on the other hand, is often like a stab in the back from fate twisting to pop seams and slash heart strings.

He tries to sleep. But he keeps seeing them. Suspended in beautiful, pale slants of sunlight coming in ribbons through massive crisscrossing branches. Crunched like pinecones underfoot. Limp, knotted, cockeyed. Swinging like abandoned marionettes. He keeps seeing Armin reaching for him from the rooftop, keeps seeing the awful, repulsive cavern of stomach tissue and stagnant blood, bile. Thick, mucky, muddy. He sees Mikasa above him sobbing like he has not seen her sob since the night her parents died and they killed people. For some reason, he keeps thinking about his father, in the dark outside the Ackerman cabin, his big hands hot and heavy on his Eren’s shoulders as he cries and he roars _What have you done, I told you to wait downstairs for me, I’m angry you put yourself in such danger without even thinking!_ and Eren keeps hearing himself say, _Dad, they were animals, no, they were worse than animals, they deserved to die_ —

His father. His father framed by thicket and tree. Vignetted in trauma-shrouded memory. His tears falling salty on Eren’s face, dirt under Eren’s fingernails as he tries to scramble away, glint of a long needle in the dark —

Eren throws back comforter and quilt, pulls on a sweater and without even putting shoes on he slips like a sylph past the Captain’s room across the way. Down the corridor, down the curving, lopsided stairs towards the main hall below. 

He plops down at the foot of the stairwell, watching through the window in a broken daze as, beyond the strong stretch of the gatehouse and its portal archway, clouds pass thinly over the pallid moon. The shadows dip and swell over the stone of the building; night moves through the trees stealthily, eagerly.

At this hour, it is as if the world is both dead and alive.

The sound of footsteps tapping the stone creeps closer to him through the dark. Eren bristles, braces for the coming lecture from whoever it is, descending to find him out of his room. He is, after all, still on probation.

Jean drifts to a slow stop behind him like a troubled spirit wandering the halls. 

It is a brutal thing, to feel such immense relief and deep dread both at once.

“What are you doing up?” Eren hunches forward to lean against drawn-up knees, his voice raw and ragged in his throat.

“I saw you pass by upstairs,” Jean replies, sounding like sleep has eluded him just as cruelly. 

The quiet unfurls between them like the sigh of a freshly extinguished candlewick.

 _Marco’s dead_.

_You almost killed Mikasa, you know that?_

_So what we have is you, having no idea you can turn into a fucking Titan, and no way to control it._

With a pinch in his chest, desolate, Eren looks up over his shoulder at Jean.

“How could you say those things to me?” he croaks.

They have spent four weeks barely talking to each other, which is not exactly the fault of either of them, all things considered. Not much since that day a month ago, after the introductory ceremony, when Eren had finally seen them all standing there outside the fort in their green cloaks, wings of freedom embroidered between the shoulders, and he’d run over like a colt too young yet to be broken, crying their names, and Jean had seethed: _That’s what we’ve got right now. That’s what our lives and the fate of humanity depends on now._

_That’s what we’ll die for, just like Marco._

Jean wilts, the dull shadow of a wince ghosting across his face as he eases down to sit not quite beside Eren, but a step or two up with hands laced on his knees. His fingers poke out of that cable knit sweater he looks so handsome in, nighttime casual. But he has not yet even taken off his uniform pants or lower belts. Even in the grey half light of the night coming in through the honey combed window, Eren can see the few scrapes on his face, the bloom of a bruise on one cheekbone. He can see the way something in Jean has burned with the funeral fires a month ago. The dimness in his eyes the ashes, and Eren the last bones resisting flames on the pyre.

It was a hard day for them all. It has been a hard month.

And if Jean looks that dead and distracted, that pale and grim and dismal, Eren can only imagine what he, himself, looks like. He has not been able to stop crying all day. From the jostling cart back from the forest, through the streets of the city, headquarters report and straight to the fort tucked into crow trees and thorn trees on the other side of the Wall. Distraught. Devastated. Violently crestfallen.

 _How could you say those things_ —

“Because,” Jean finally murmurs in reply. “You’re the hero.”   

Eren opens his mouth to argue, but he does not know what to say to that.

A slow, sweeping horror passes through him like a wind. _You’re the hero_. It’s true. He knows it’s true, whether it’s only in the minds of the people who survived or if it’s actually written in the words of the cosmos. But all the fight has fallen out from under him. He is … _afraid_ , and fear feels like cold, the absence of something.

The taste of rotten rage fills his mouth suddenly. He grits his teeth on it to grind it away, grind it back down his throat. Rage that he should be so helpless and useless and purposeless suddenly. That fate would have the nerve to burden him with this responsibility, this guilt. He did not ask for the weight of the world on his shoulders. He did not ask to be _the hero_.

Jean shifts, clears his throat. Presses his palms together, slides his hands down his legs. He draws a breath that wanders for a moment, thick with words about to be spoken —

“Maybe I’m being selfish,” he says.

Eren glances over at him through his lashes, sitting with elbow propped on knee and face resting in a silencing hand.

“But I actually think it’s _worse_ ,” Jean goes on. “To lose someone, only to have them come back from the dead. It’s a little fucked up. And you’re the one who told _me_ not to leave _you_. Ironic, right?”

Armin on the roof, white with fear and eyes like broken glass with tears. Himself collapsed on the rooftop, what he must have looked like with only three and a half limbs. How much blood he must have smeared across the shingles.

A new guilt cinches Eren’s heart even tighter, and with a vengeance.

“It’s not your fault,” Jean says hoarsely. Squad Levi, he means. Today.

“You weren’t there,” Eren hisses through his teeth, clenches them against the urge to cry that chokes him up and extinguishes his breath. He drops his hand from his mouth, flashes of everything portending in the back of his mind, breathing down his neck.

“‘When we exist, death does not. When death exists, we do not.’ People die, Eren. We all die.” Jean pauses, glancing at Eren quickly, as if he feels the quote is too cavalier even for him without explanation. “Uh, I read that — there’s this book by an old philosopher, I found it in the library here the other day … ”

Eren just gawks at him, fingers curling tight in the sleeves of his own sweater. Stricken. Strangely riveted. A laugh bubbles like a brook in his throat, wavers through his teeth more like a scoff, incredulous. He wants to say, _Cynical, much?_ No belief in the boatman for whom coins are left on eyes, placed in pallid palms, fields of real paradise? 

“God, I missed you,” he ends up blurting instead. The world doubles, trebles with thickening tears. He chokes out miserably, “I don’t want to fight anymore … ”

Jean nods slow, brow knotted. They are both to blame, after all. Forgiveness fraught with fault.

“Why did you change your mind?” Eren’s voice trembles as much as he himself does, throat raw and aching. The veneer of tears stings his eyes. A grimace that longs to break into a sob twitches at his brow, at his lip, his nose. “About joining the Corps?”

He does not want to reminisce; he’s not looking to recriminate. He just wants to know Jean forgives him. Not for who he is, or what he’s said, but for the things that have happened because of who he is and what he’s said. The things out of his control. Just wants to know he doesn’t hate him for their lost elysium.

Jean is quiet. His hazel eyes dim to embers, but there is something altogether warmer and placid than the way they’ve dimmed before, when he is dismissed and denounced. He just looks at him a moment. Looks at him like he pities his impossible hero’s innocence, pities him for not yet comprehending how much everything has changed. How things will never be the same. Not in the world, and not in their bloodstained souls.

“I was always going to come with you,” Jean confesses finally.  

And man, does he sell himself short when it comes to comforting someone; he assumes he’s terrible at it because he doesn’t know how to comfort himself. But the thing is, his very presence is all the sweet, soft, solemn solace Eren needs right now.

Eren breaks.

His heart lurches and then plummets and then beats much too fast, syncopated with the way he chokes on his breath as hot, vehement sobs rip loose in fragments from where they have been locked away so deeply in his chest. A stormy sort of crying, nature and nothingness. Chopped, and stuttering, body seizing up as the tears gush fat and scalding down his feverish face.

He cries for all the ones he couldn’t save, and he cries for all the ones he wants to save.

Jean scrapes himself down a step or two, folds Eren in against him and holds him there, tight. Smothering his hiccups and his chokes into his chest as his palm closes more in a clutch than a cup at the crown of the skull. Protective. Possessive. Desperate to feel him, to shield him as he nurses fresh wounds and old wounds and his smoldering, grief-sick fury. He pulls Eren’s face back by the sweater collar and with his nose cold from the night, frantically he tries to kiss the tears away, through salt and snot and shuddering gasps. Sweet, stupid, fumbling Jean.

“Don’t cry,” he says through his teeth, a plea masked as a command, and he may as well tell fire, _Don’t burn_.

But the thing is, crying like this, Eren suddenly feels like he can breathe again. He jams himself forward, feels bad for smearing the mess of his face across Jean’s, feels self-conscious for the searing heat of mouth sticky and chapped from crying as he crushes it up to Jean’s in a kiss that is as cathartic and dauntingly exhilarating as the first all over again.

The intermission is over.

And the wooden soldiers march forth to phase two.

 

 

**end ch. i**

_* valenkii_ – galoshes and felt boots

* _The Mercies_ – think sort of like valkyrie meet fairies 

* _Jour des Morts / Koliada_ – plays on Halloween and Christmas season, respectively, see _when we see the sea[part one](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2668580/chapters/5965448)_  for more on that!

* _rushlight_ – type of candle/tiny torch made from burning reeds/rush plant


	2. the aftertaste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which a castle outside Hermina District is under siege, and Eren is kidnapped in the shadows of colossal trees; in which childhood vows of revenge are cute next to the bolstering exhilaration of animal animosity, of hate and renewed force of will; in which they are very careful not to make a mess when they do it on Conny's bed; and in which, for the first time, it sounds like Jean believes in himself. and Eren believes him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **a/n:** putting this up early IN CELEBRATION OF SNK 102 LEAKS GUYS THEY’RE SO HOT ~~eren please shave~~ THEY’RE ALL SO H O T // please think of _[hummed low](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnc7GYmp-qM)_[ by **odessa**]() when you envision the day mission, and if you have not heard **[woodkid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a-em1lr2FU)**[ _run boy run_ instrumental version](), THAT TOO  
>  // [spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/12169251584/playlist/2OZGUINyfg1GaXNij4rlQ7?si=vzwFdW9nTZS_QXrAVERStw)

ii. THE AFTERTASTE

* * *

They say there were children in that Wallist chapel, in the heart of Stohess District. The one smashed during the battle between the Female Titan and Eren Jäger. The children died. Jean saw a bloody teddy bear on the broken steps. The Stohess officials said, _It’d be best if_ … _the Corps removed itself during cleanup. The people are grieving and the collateral damage is enough reminder_. And what they really meant was: _We don’t want these God damn monsters in our district_. 

So the Corps splits up like good repentants, offering temporary service to other squads as necessary. The main building of the Karanese District stationary troops headquarters is more bustling than that of Trost’s, but that is understandable. They have not been under the same threats lately. Voices, and activity, and standard issue military tan coming and going. The flagstone and floorboards are routinely swept, at least into corners where the dust piles can’t be seen, and all the wicks in the gas lamps are properly trimmed. The mess hall is warm, full of provisions being unloaded. And the small drifting troops Karanese houses are, as requested (as if children punished by chores), a great help preparing food for the kitchen.

“Aren’t you from Shiganshina?” Jean mutters, casting Eren a sidelong glance.

“Uh.” Eren looks back at him with the usual pinch of sass that often accompanies his confusion. “Yeah?”

Jean gestures, raising his brows. “Then why are you so terrible at peeling potatoes?”

Eren doesn’t even have to look where Jean points. He makes an ugly face at him, wrinkled nose and narrowed eyes, knife and half-peeled potato in cupped palms. Seated beside him, Armin laughs, thumbs following the coil of potato skin in his own hands, fingers wet from the dunk in water.

“He always cuts himself,” Mikasa reminds Jean, and as Eren makes a face at her next, Armin tilts his head to the side and laughs some more. Jean perks in a little half-grin, lashes lowered as he watches his own hands, the knife, the dancing petals of potato skin.

“Let me do it,” Mikasa murmurs, reaching for Eren’s potato.

“No,” Eren snaps with a dark pout, holding it just out of reach.

“You’re taking hunks of potato out. You’re wasting it.”

“Oh my _God_ , you guys, there’s a whole barrel — ”

“This is the actual reason Mikasa always peels the potatoes for him,” Armin informs Jean, and Jean gives a silent chuckle, incline of the chin and open-mouthed smile.  

“I hate _all_ of you,” Eren growls.

A shout erupts, outside the mess hall in the main corridor of the building. Louder, new voices following. An argument, perhaps. A heated discussion. No, this rings with notes of urgency. Jean recognizes the chords of alarm. He freezes, as does his soul, a little throb of the heart that feels like ice in his veins —

“Titans spotted!”

The message is making its way through the building as the messenger himself hurries to the main offices.

“Titans spotted within Wall Rose, to the southeast! Hermina District under evacuation!”

Dread thickens in Jean’s throat as his eyes dart to Eren.

Eren sits stock still on the crate beside the benches of the cluttered table where they’ve gathered with the potatoes, feet propped up on coils of rope. Sleeves rolled to the elbows, smudges of dirt on his damp knuckles like the whole barrel of potatoes smells of dirt and childhood summers, half-butchered spud in one hand and paring knife clutched in the other. Fingers tightening, fisting up.

His eyes, wide and hungry like a wildfire. 

“Accompanying Captain Levi and Squad Leader Hanji to Hermina District for dispatch are Executive Officer Moblit Berne — ”

A list of names, but the three that matter are Mikasa Ackerman, Armin Arlert — Eren Jäger.

“Accompanying Commander Smith to Trost District to convene with Commander Pixis are — ”

Strangers, and Jean Kirschtein.

Eren’s eyes swerve to Jean and Jean bristles against a quick shiver in their heat, like being young and running a finger through the leap of a candle just to prove courage back when courage was simple. 

Chaos. Organized chaos. Horses are prepared. Meetings called to strategize in the event the situation cannot be taken under control by the Corps, a rather divided sort of discussion yet. The crowds thin out only to clot up in some corners for whispers and pep talks.

“It’ll be okay.”

“I don’t like it.”

“It’ll be _okay_ , Jean — ”

The whispers of their sad excuse for a pep talk hiss around the corner in the shadows just outside a supply room, although neither need to gather much because their respective squads have hands for loading up the carts. “Extra gas cannisters,” Eren had said in passing to their superiors. He’s gotten good at finding outs from Mikasa’s sharp eyes. _It will be okay_ , he says now, toe bumping into a collection of gas cannisters as in the dim, dusty room, he spins on Jean and closes a hand on his arm. He does not even need to pull; Jean’s arms are already around him, his mouth is already finding his. A different sort of frantic, not quite rushed but hasty, soft and breathless and warm. Eren’s fingers curl in Jean’s sleeves. His body is tight against Jean’s, tight and burning with that implacable madman’s passion of his. His mind is already flying miles to the southeast but his kisses are not distracted, they are fast but they are so sweet and tender and meaningful. _It will be okay_ , those kisses say, too. _I will make sure it’s okay_.

Jean is still not sure he quite trusts that yet.

No, he does not trust it yet.

If he trusts at all, it is a numb faith in fate, and a helpless hope that that fate is a good one.

“I’ll see you soon,” Eren gasps against the corner of Jean’s mouth as he breaks away earlier than Jean wants him to, and God damn, if he can’t just let a farewell unfold before he’s on to the next. But he has always been this way. Fixated and restless.

And Jean should know by now that it is impossible to chase the sun.

The aftertaste of Eren’s flurry of kisses lingers on Jean’s lips, as he watches the unit dispatch for Hermina, like the shape of his spirit has seared itself into Jean’s chest. His own unit dispatches towards Trost District, with shouts and cheers (and jeers) and the thunder of horses. The upper officers have been placing him close by the side of Commander Smith recently. He is afraid to know what that means. And as he shields his eyes against the early afternoon sun with one hand, he white knuckles worn leather reins with the other — pink. The wind is blowing petals from flowering dogwoods that line the street, and a stray, curling bract landed between his thumb and forefinger. It shivers there a moment, and then as the humbly sized squad pounds through the yawning mouth of the district’s gate, it slips away into the wind.

***

“Day Mission,” the whispers had once passed through training camp over breakfast of bland oatmeal and stewed fruit in the place of honey. “Day Mission!”

The mountain breeze was sweet and crisp through summer sunshine, in the gentle slopes of land outside the barbed-wire laced fences that wind around the central field of camp. Equestrianism drills had intensified lately; the infirmary almost ran out of splint materials and ice packs. Flying from horseback to tree and back to horseback is both thrilling and terrifying, pop of maneuvering gear pistons and whine of wires, hiss of gas, whistle of the wind in the ears and achingly delicious tension in core muscles.

On this Day Mission there was no maneuver gear, just strips of colored cloth tied round upper arms and belted thighs, a capture the flag sort of exercise in agility, dexterity, precision in close range combat on horseback. Shouts and laughter and friendly threats as flags were ripped back and forth, collected like war trophies, stuffed in pockets and belts for safekeeping, pursuits between cadets who had gradually learned to turn some drills into less work than they were play.

Eren had four flags jammed in an inner thigh belt, finally breaking line of sight from the quicker, more adroit on his drill team — winded, a little sweaty for the sweet kiss of the summer afternoon, the jostle of wrestling for bounty at gallops and swinging turns. His mare heaved healthy breaths below him as he took the temporary peace to catch his own; his thighs felt bruised from squeezing to keep balance. He’d taken notes to give Armin once they got back and it was his team’s turn to go. The breeze rippled through the small, rolling wildgrass field upon which the trees broke at the southwestern end of military grounds, willowy blades swaying and dancing. Eren wanted to find a stream or something for his horse to drink, some water to splash on his flushed face —

“Annie’s background check came in,” Hanji says in the lamplight outside the stables in Hermina District, the night a thick velvety cobalt stretching over a city in chaos.

“Reiner Braun and Berthold Hoover,” she says thickly.

“He asked me — ” Armin’s eyes are wide, stormy blue. Guilt and resentment forging together bitterly for having been so cruelly taken advantage of. “He must have told Annie where Eren was by carving it into her palm … ”

They leave Hermina’s outer gates in the dead of night, the hours before dawn that are neither awake nor asleep. The torch Eren clutches hisses and crackles near his face. White knuckling the stave of it, white knuckling the reins of his horse. He can feel the shape of the dark, determined look he wears, illumined and outlined in the hot light of the fire. And it feels so damn good to burn with fury after too long feeling helpless.

“Make them think we don’t suspect them,” Squad Leader Hanji says, eyes flashing in the firelight. “We need to confine them.”

They are enemies, after all.

No. Not enemies. Worse than that.

They are _traitors_.

— A little over a year ago, in the wildgrass and wildflowers outside training grounds, when Eren had stopped for a break during capture the flag. There was movement behind him in the tree line. He turned his horse around with a gentle arch of the back to keep balance, eyes wide, scanning the foliage and mossy shadows of beech and alder. He heard the snort and head toss of another horse; he turned almost a full circle before he finally saw the horse rip loose from the trees charging right for him, shining sleek and chestnut brown, and it took Eren another breath or two but then he recognized the figure hunched low at the rippling neck, bouncing mane.

With a yelp and an expletive, Eren wheeled his horse around and dug his heels in for her to take off.

“Your luck’s run out, Jäger!” Jean had called from behind him, with the rare kind of honest laugh that always left Eren idly enchanted.  

“Fuck you, I worked really hard for these flags!”

“Work harder!”

“My horse is tired — ”

“Titans won’t care!”

“Fuck you, Jean, oh my — _God_ — ”

Eren was half shouting, half choking on a startled scoff as Jean slipped easily up to flank him, the tall grass proving a bit of a deterrent when it came to speed. Sunlight caught in that dancing ash blond hair, in those haughty hazel eyes. Jean reached with swift, confident precision for the flags streaming back from the belt on Eren’s leg, so impressive in his speed and his balance though he only ever pretended to know. But Eren swung his leg up out of the way, a clumsy, instinctive jab of the heel. It knocked Jean’s arm off course; it knocked Eren way off balance; his toe caught on one of Jean’s reins and almost got stuck, he half-kicked the mare just behind the ear on accident. Shocked and angry, she whipped her head side to side, reared up — and the last thing Eren saw before he flew off the side of his own horse was Jean’s horse taking off with a sharp, indignant whinny and an equally empty saddle.

The grass was a little bit of a cushion, at least, as Eren tumbled to the ground all elbows and knees and breath knocked loose from his chest. He coughed, rolled over right onto a hidden rock against his ribs. “ _Fuuuuck_ ,” he half-groaned, half-growled, furious for the sneak attack but feeling victorious for the minor win of escaping a lost flag.

He stood up with the world still spinning, everything momentarily throbbing for the hard impact on the ground.

His horse had run off to the shade of the tree line; Jean’s was stomping and snorting about a quarter-stade away in the shivering grass, still irritated but well-trained against bolting. And Jean was …

“Hey!” Eren called, squinting through the sun. “Kirschtein!”

Nothing. He did not see Jean anywhere. He did not hear him.

Eren started towards Jean’s horse, stomping what tall grass he could, shoving and sweeping with hands raw from sweaty leather reins.

“Jean!” he shouted again. “Where are you?”

Nothing but the summer sun and the breeze and the annoyed horses.

Eren stopped, stomach sinking gently. His heart, pounding now not for the game but for a sudden creeping worry. Had Jean fallen, too? Why wasn’t he getting up? Where did he go? It would take Eren forever to look through all this wildgrass. Plus it had patches of massive spider webs like gates, probably snakes. _Shit_. A stronger wind rushed through the blades of grass — no, wait, someone was coming —

After Berthold and Reiner on the Wall, it’s the fucking trees again, just like with Squad Levi and the Female Titan.

The silent, ancient, colossal (funny) trees.

“How _dare_ you act like you’re some kind of victim!”

Eren feels like the surrounding bark scrapes his words to pieces as they echo, as he flings them adamant and emphatic up at Reiner and Berthold where they perch a thick gnarled branch or two up like gargoyles more than birds.

 _Eren, we need to talk_ , Reiner said, on the Wall not long after sunrise, not long after Utgard is secured.

“And you, Berthold — you _fucking_ lap dog —  ”

 _I’m the Armored Titan_.

“Don’t you two remember what I told you? Sitting around back in training?”

 _And he’s the Colossal Titan_.

“I told you about the time my mother got eaten by a Titan! Didn’t I!”

Reiner, with smug indifference chiseled into the stone of his face. Berthold, sniveling there like this is somehow tragic to him. And fucking Ymir, her dull brown eyes sliding to Eren through steam that swirls from wrist and ankle like some sort of smoke signal to any god who will recognize her.

Rage is the silvery taste in Eren’s mouth — or it’s probably just the taste of recovery as phantom limb syndrome sets in early — cold, undiluted, indefatigable practiced and primal rage, and his voice swells from his diaphragm as, livid, he howls, “I told you about how she couldn’t escape because a piece of the gate you kicked in landed on my house, you motherfuckers! What did you think? What did you think when I told you that? I guess it was just some sick fucking bedtime story for you two, huh — ?”

“What did I think?” Berthold’s words are tiny, face pressed to his shoulder where he frowns down at Eren with such pity. He is a shivering silhouette for a moment, as below him Eren’s body steams from the elbows. It feels like his forearms are on fire as they grow back, slowly, so slowly, hissing like kindling, a baking heat like holding one’s hands over the stove too close for too long.

Berthold’s brow knots and he says thinly, “I felt very sorry for you.”

Something in Eren fractures. Deep.

“You’re fucking murderers!” he roars, voice ripping itself raw. “You’re mass murderers! You’re not even human anymore, _you’re_ the ones who turned this world into a _living hell_ , don’t you _see_ that — ”

“What do you want us to do, repent? Apologize? Beg for forgiveness?” Where Berthold’s voice is like the chirping of a bird high in the branches, Reiner’s thunderous retort sends a flock of them scattering from nearby. His face is red, Eren can see his pulse stand out in his thick throat, his temple. “Go on, cry about it! It’s what you do best!”

This may be true. Eren’s jaw hurts for how tightly he clenches his teeth, grinds the taste of metal between them to savor it. He is mindless. He is trembling with rage. His eyes are wide and wild and cold with tears waiting for release. And as his arms ache like growing pains, leaves him dizzied as Titan biotics work their witchcraft — muscle unfurling, ligaments thickening, bone elongating and chipping itself into shape, cracking into place, blood blooming and pulsing into new epidermal silk — as, to the young men who spent heartrending, body-breaking, spirit-testing, laughter-filled days and nights upon end with him as if they were anyone’s friends, Eren revels in the soothing rush of pure hatred and edges out:

“No, I’m going to … I’m going to work hard to make sure you both die the most _painful_ death possible.”

— In the mountain field, during the Day Mission a year and a half ago, Jean had burst forth from the wildgrass and crashed into him from behind, arms shooting about his middle and taking him down in a jumble of broad shoulders and choked voice, tangled legs and flailing arms.  

There was a brief wrestle, Eren swearing and writhing, trying to protect the flags on his leg. Jean’s body was fever hot from the exercise, just slightly sticky at the throat, under his collar. Fingers burning, hair wind-tousled, face flushed. The way he smelled after small activity infallibly invigorated Eren — his richness amplified, skin and hair and sweat and morning care package Trost bastard cologne filling Eren’s mouth, his lungs, his head, working some magic under his skin, pheromones and adrenaline.

Intoxicating like the smell of the one you’re in love with always is.

Jean finally gave up on fighting for the flags and just sort of collapsed half across Eren to catch his breath. Eren went limp under him in turn. His pulse pounded in his throat and his wrists and his fingertips.

“You’re a fucking suicidal moron if you think kicking a titan is a good idea,” Jean panted, with respect to Eren’s choice of defense tactic five minutes earlier.

“Shut up.”

“I’m just saying, _think_ , Eren. You’re so reckless.”

“Don’t tell me how to fight.” 

“Were you worried about me?” Jean purred after a moment, from the place between Eren’s ear and shoulder.

Eren issued a sound of disgust, shoving at him without real purpose or real desire to move him away. “No, you cheating dick!”

“I didn’t cheat,” Jean argued. The offended injury was far from affected. “I used _strategy_.”

“Like you need any strategy just sitting around the interior as MP — ”

Jean had rolled over to really pin Eren to the ground now, all sculpted shoulders and strained muscles and a demanding but tender kiss to shut him up. A low growl of frustration quivered in Eren’s throat, but he did not forego the kiss. He acquiesced, hands falling still with fingers curled in Jean’s sleeves. Both sweaty and sticky and the kissing was slightly salty but in a way that prompted a deeper press to find the hot sweetness beyond —

The whirl of the world when one is just a speck on a Titan’s shoulder is deafening, but Eren can hear them all shouting. He can feel it more than he can actually hear it, maybe. Feel them through the stifling heat behind armored Titan fingers, through the rumble of a massive body in a ground-shaking sprint.

Armin, the master of words, that special sort of courageousness of his that the rest of them envy, his voice is distant yet somehow still near. Eren can’t figure out what he’s saying.

“Reiner and Berthold will kill her if she doesn’t do what they say!” Christa’s shrill little cry.

“There are only so many lives I value, and I decided that six years ago — so don’t ask for my pity — I don’t have time to care or room in my heart — ”

Even in the midst of such paramount pandemonium, Mikasa’s focus is razor sharp. She speaks and it is muffled, but Eren can feel the edge of vengeance in her words. He can feel her love, such a pure and uncomplicated sort of love, her conviction and merciless drive, he can see her that day in the mountain cabin with a knife in her hands and bare toes curling on cold floorboards.

“Stop, Eren! Stop moving around!” Berthold is panicking, shoulders digging into Eren’s as Eren’s shoulders dig into him and he kicks and he pushes and, breathing like an animal, chest heaving, he throws himself side to side trying to — do anything, really. Get his hands free. Break out of the suffocating cave of Reiner’s hand. He cannot let Mikasa down. He cannot let Armin down. He cannot …

“You’re asking for too much, there, Berthold!”

 _Jean_.

“You know it’s impossible to settle him down, right? He’s so loud and hopeless! Trust me, I know, and I hate that about him! But maybe if we work together, the two of us can take care of him. Just come on out of there … ”

Eren freezes, eyes widening and breath hitching in his throat just to hear the voice. Jean’s words are carved from a tone of voice not wholly unlike that of old training ground loftiness, that naïve affectation of indifference on a high horse made of kindling, but — breathless now, and under pressure, fear whittled into clenched teeth and resistance to powerlessness —

For the first time, it sounds like Jean believes in himself.

And Eren believes him.

— In the wildgrass, Jean had tilted his head for a better angle; Eren stretched up a little to help. Tongue, darting out along his lower lip. His gut tightened, sparks of delight, mouth fell open to take Jean’s tongue into it. Graze of teeth, easing breaths between. He was dizzy, dizzy anew, and the sky was so blue overhead, and the grass whispered things about them all around them, and his knees shook for the strain on his thighs from the horse and also for the shock of pleasant surprise when Jean’s hand ran up his leg, clawed his shirt loose from his belt as if it happened on accident along the way to the skin of his chest beneath. Teeth, tongue, deeper, harder. Just a little frisky. Just a little handsy. An impulsive little tease and preview of a romp to come, quick, sloppy make-out session, another small competition: who can get the other more hot and bothered first? Can’t be tardy for end roll call. Just enough to say, _Sorry I scared you_ and enough to say, _God, I hate you so much because I actually don’t_ and Eren’s heart skipped a beat as Jean’s hand dragged back down, between his hips, over the devilishly ticklish part of the thigh and leather belt and …

Jean broke away with a breath through his teeth and a wild laugh as he leapt back to his feet and dashed off with the flags he’d ripped from Eren’s belt.

Eren choked on a sound of indignation, sitting up sharp. Fingernails scraping dirt as he pressed his palms into the ground, mouth open, eyes wide.

“Jean, you fucking asshole!” he howled, flushed and flustered and furious.

Jean’s voice echoed from somewhere close to his horse, without apology or shame. “I need good marks on this trial, Eren!”

Eren scrambled up with a groan much more like a snarl and set off after Jean, before swerving to the tree line to get his horse, which would make for a much easier chase. “My fist will give you good fucking marks on your face, Kirschtein!”  

Jean’s laugh had swayed and shivered like the wildgrass through which he wove his way back to his mare, and the mountain breeze was sweet and the summer sunshine warm —

And behind Eren, the wind sways and shivers through Mikasa’s hair as tears roll down from dark lashes to red scarf. And before him, a far too familiar titan grins ugly and repugnant. Spindly arms and great, lumpy ribcage, red lips pulled back taut from redder gums and thick teeth. The thing reeks. It reeks of rot and death and sweat and there is blood everywhere. Blood, all that is left of Hannes. Blood from Eren’s bruised and throbbing hands as he screams. The world is astigmatic, prismatic, through the tears and the snot as his soul breaks open and he pounds his bloody fists on the ground and just screams out with all the shuddering hatred his bones can allow.

Eren is old enough to know everyone ends up dying, but not quite old enough to stop forgetting.  

It cannot end this way.

It will not end this way.

Childhood vows of revenge are cute next to the bolstering exhilaration of animal animosity, of hate and renewed force of will.   

There are bits of military uniform and splinters of bone stuck in the smiling titan’s teeth. Its monstrous hand unfurls towards them like smoke on the wind and Eren drags himself to his feet, guarding Mikasa as he pulls back a fist. He can feel heat bloom in his muscles as they contract; fingernails rusty with drying blood bite into his palm. And he swings with every shred of primordial rage the atoms of a man can buzz into being from first human down.

The earth shudders.

With a low moan of great, lumbering movement, the titan with its revolting, witless leer pulls back to stand at full height. Blonde hair falls in its squinting eyes as it looks down at them, as if it has any self-awareness at all to long for the taste of their flesh. And then it turns, slowly, and the earth trembles under its feet — under many feet — veritably quakes as the swarming titans turn their senseless gluttony to the Armored.   

In the mountains training back then, capture the flag and a field of wildgrass, the summer day smelled so sweet and crisp and pure.

Today the sun is autumn sweet, and beyond the Walls it smells of gas and metal and gore. Mikasa stares up at Eren in a daze as he grabs a corner of her red scarf and throws it around her shoulders one more time. She clings to him as he takes the reins of her horse and digs his heels in to its taut, shimmering sides. Ash from disintegrating titans coats his tongue with the taste of sulfur, tickles his bare arms. Mikasa’s horse does not even need guidance to burst in a gallop away from the carnage.

“What the hell?” Eren chokes out, torn between terror and thrill. “What just happened?”

Mikasa draws a shivering breath and he cannot tell if she is wincing through a sound of pain or a gentle sob of relief, holding on from behind with her dirtied hand pressed to his heart over his blood-stained shirt.

All of them like little ants scattering from a boot — green cloaks, shining horses. There, Armin on horseback, with Jean slumped behind him, blood running from his temple and his nose, wine dark.

“Eren! Mikasa!” Armin cries, voice breaking under the relief as Eren guides Mikasa’s horse up to his right. Mikasa gives him a weak little wave around Eren’s side.

And holding to Armin, Jean finds Eren’s eyes. Dully sparking hazel, dark, damning. As if to say, _How dare you make me worry?_ As if his worry, his pain, his injuries, everything is Eren’s fault. And maybe it is. Maybe it is all Eren’s fault. But he can’t help but smile, tension uncoiling in his shoulders. They are alive. All four of them are alive. And the exhilaration washes through him like delirium. He grins at Jean, mouth flaking the rust of dried and drying blood from tearing at his hands with his teeth to no avail. He cannot tell if he, himself, is still crying or not, but he holds Jean’s eyes.

“I told you it would be okay!” he calls through the jostle of the horses, the windstorm howling of voracious titans.

Behind them, the Armored Titan issues a horrendous, thundering, ear-ringing roar, and a laugh rattles up from the pit of Eren’s chest. It breaks loose from his throat light and pure, and he tightens his grip on the reins of Mikasa’s horse and digs his heels in again. The horse speeds up as Mikasa’s arm hooks harder around his side, and Eren can feel Jean’s eyes on him as they pass. He can always feel Jean’s eyes on him. It’s like the sun on his back.

***

The night has settled thick atop the Wall, but the air feels clear enough to breathe again. Perhaps it’s just that Jean is no longer in the pulse of pluck and persistence. He knows he’ll feel the exhaustion soon enough — deferred panic — but for now, enough adrenaline lingers to keep his breath even and his limbs moving. The wind this high off the ground dusts blond hair about Armin’s temple as he hands Jean a wet cloth to clean the last of the blood from his face.

“Thanks,” Jean husks, voice threadbare in his throat not from delayed emotions but from the wear and tear of shouting, fighting, breathing hard. He looks up at Armin, a flickering glance without lifting his chin. Armin nods a little, worried press of his mouth to match the worried pinch of his brow. He knows what Jean means. Thanks for the cloth. Thanks for saving his life. Jean shrugs, drooping with a sheepish little smile. Armin wilts a little too, returning the perk of the mouth — like all he needed was a smile, and Jean is the first to offer one since reconvening. But then his eyes slide past Jean and sharpen there; he gives Jean’s shoulder a comforting squeeze (Jean winces; he didn’t know it was the bruised one) as he hurries past and darts over to where they are lowering Mikasa down on a field gurney.

Jean watches. Armin, crouching beside Eren, who on his knees at Mikasa’s side hovers over her, shoulders bunched. Tattered sleeves, can’t tell the difference in the dark between dirt stains and dried blood. Jean cannot hear them speak, but he can see them. See Mikasa’s exhausted smile, the shine in her eyes as she reaches with her slim, pale fingers — slim, pale, killer fingers — to touch Eren’s face and Eren’s shoulders hunch a little more. He’s probably crying. Or trying not to. He tucks Mikasa’s scarf around her shoulders carefully, lovingly. Armin puts his arm around him, flutter of green wool cloak. And it is the strangest thing, to look at something like that and feel so full yet so empty at the same time —

“Commander! Someone, quick! _Commander_!”

“Ready the lift!”

Eren scrambles to his feet, at the ready. He wheels to Armin; Mikasa shakes her head. Armin looks back brokenly, mouth open but speechless.

Jean climbs up with a scrape of the heel atop the Wall, limply tossing the dirty cloth in his palm as he wanders over to the three of them.

Eren is bristled and brittle and Armin seems just as afraid to touch him as Jean is, lest he shatter into pieces like the bright shine of tears in his wide, horrified eyes.

“How many people died this time?” he demands, voice hoarse velvet from yelling too much or not enough. “Because of me?”  

Dread settles thick in the pit of Jean’s chest as Conny moves like a shadow to join them.

They started with a hundred, thanks to support units from the Military Police. There are maybe forty on the wall. Only half of them are up and walking. Most of the Corps’ seasoned members litter the fields outside the Wall like twigs broken underfoot walking a wooded trail —

“We didn’t take any losses on the way back, though,” Armin says, searching for Eren’s eyes. But Eren stands in a cold daze as if he does not even hear the words. If on the battlefield he was the sharpened blade of instinct, here he is shaken innocence. And there is a different shadow to the stormy blue of Armin’s eyes, a fearlessness he is not yet aware of, like his small frame houses the soul of something arcane, something secret and sage-like.

“All the titans attacked Reiner, and Annie … ” He stares at Eren. “Annie had the ability to make them do that. But this time, it was _you_ , wasn’t it, Eren?”

Lips parted for a shivering breath, Eren’s eyes drift aimlessly until they find Jean’s.

“It’s up to you,” Jean says with an apologetic calm he is not well acquainted with, and unsure of whence it comes. He still feels unworthy to infringe upon the fringes of Eren’s pain, that glory and the woeful embers in those amber eyes. It is inviolable in some dark, holy way, and it terrifies Jean still, sometimes, how much he admires Eren. He, the sun, and Jean, just the moon, and Jean cannot discern whether he is flirting with self-destruction or destruction itself.

“What?” Eren half-mouths, half-breathes.

Jean shrugs limply. “Whether all these people died for nothing to get you back.”

A silence settles between the four of them like a held breath.

But Eren’s eyes burn in the darkness now like the glowworms of bobbing torches up and down the Wall.

“Man,” he croaks with a little twitch of a smirk, “you really got preachy since you joined the Survey Corps, didn’t you?”

Jean issues a sound of surprise a bit closer to an embarrassed scoff. “Yeah? What about you? I’ve never known you to be so whiny and indecisive all the time.”

“No, he’s right, Jean,” Conny pipes up. “You’ve gotten eerily serious and responsible.”

“You still look like you’re ready to kick everyone’s ass, though,” Armin adds.

“What the hell, guys?” Jean sputters through a hard laugh. Praise like this is not something he ever expected, ears burning in shy, flustered pride. Through a bittersweet ache for how normal this moment feels, in spite of tragedy that has _just_ transpired —     

“Thanks, Jean.”

They look to Eren, who stands gawking at his open palm as if determined to read his fate in the heart line of it.

“You’re right,” he husks. “I have to do this. I’m going to control the titans. Seal the hole in Wall Maria. Make sure I … repay everyone who died. And I promise I’ll give Reiner and Berthold a death even worse than the ones they deserve. I _swear_ it.”

He is trembling, a pinch to his face beautifully brutal and brutally beautiful and brilliantly brazen. There are still faint and fading scars from the sinew of the nape of his own Titan branching from his eyes. But Eren the martyr of the last month is gone. In his place is Eren the madman, the Eren who is love and hate. There is no in between. There are no schemes with him, no unspokens. What the world sees is what the world gets, which is so trying on the patience but it is so wonderful to Jean’s heart and there is still a cold distance — yes, Eren has divorced inconvenient emotions from this moment of truth, this disaster, fearless to act on conviction regardless of consequence. Riding back to the Wall, worse for the wear but gossamer laughter through blood and dirt …

That night after Annie’s first attack, in the forest, a small fear had articulated itself in Jean’s soul as he’d sat there holding Eren on the cold dark stairs of the Corps fort and kissed away the sacristy of his tears. He’d feared Eren is not ready for this, that he will be crushed beneath the weight of living. Of fighting. Of saving.

But he can see it in Eren’s eyes, suddenly:

Eren is ready for this. Eren is serious. Eren is going to shine. Eren was made for this. Eren is terrified but he is more _angry_ than afraid and this has summoned some ancient almost-forgotten fury in him from long before. It has awakened a beast in him. A blood song of pain turned to vengeance, to something meaningful. Fire cannot burn fire. Chaos cannot destroy chaos.

And if anyone is going to make it through the end of the world, it will be Eren.

“Guys!”

Christa stumbles to a stop from jogging over, activity which she is not yet quite bounced back enough to endure. She can’t catch her breath for a moment, leaning forth with hands on her knees. Her eyes, wide and blue, her blonde hair messy and wind-tangled, breast heaving as she gasps, “We need to hurry!”

Conny’s face pinches. “What for?”

“My real name is Historia,” she says. “We need to get to the other side of the Wall. We need to _hurry_ — ”

Her lashes flutter; her eyes dim; she says, “ _Oh,_ ” as she realizes she is blacking out from exhaustion after the last twenty-four hours’ torment. “Sorry — ” she peeps, and Armin is the fastest one to catch her as she falls.

***

Confirmation that Wall Rose is still intact comes one week after the crisis began, but it is the day after they convene in Trost District for rest and recuperation — medical attention, real sleep in the lodgings of the stationary troops headquarters, hot food in the yawning mess hall, the same mess hall at which new recruits had celebrated that fateful day a month ago — that Eren hurries through the corridors of the building after finally being released from the main offices where he’d given his official statement, swings into the doorway of the room which Jean shares with Conny and cries, “I forgot to tell you! I made my first kill!”

Jean is alone, sitting at the desk under the tall window, shirt collar open and the top two buttons undone. He looks up with a dance of sunlight through his hair, startled, then swiftly shuffles papers in his lap and hurries to shove them in the drawer, an almost unnoticeable blush rosying his cheeks for a breath or two. But he was not fast enough. Eren saw. He is drawing again. Sleeves rolled up, dark pencil lead and soft pastel kisses of color to his knuckles, his fingertips.

“You did?” he says, little arc of the brows, as if he refuses to acknowledge he knows Eren saw.  

Eren nods vehemently, leaning there in the doorway with a drum of his fingers on the frame. “Yeah. I did!”

“Congratulations, you maniac. We should have a drink to celebrate your love affair with violence.”

Eren’s smile wilts a little; his eyes flicker over Jean through his lashes, conscious of the sarcasm, not quite aware yet, perhaps not ever, that violence is both his virtue and his vice. 

He slips into the room with a little scuff of the ankle boots on the faded floorboards, shuts the door quietly and wanders over to plop down on the edge of Jean’s bed. Even with the small distance between them, he can smell Jean’s cologne, sharp and alluring hint of rose water, mild musk, sandalwood. His skin, the tea tree oil soap with which he washes his face in the mornings. Is he regularly shaving yet? Eren isn’t. But Eren has not shared the same wash room with him in a long while. Has it even been long enough since disbanding and recruitment that things like that should change without him?  

Jean stands, turns to sit on the edge of the other bed mirroring Eren as if still timid to too often brave the space between them designed by those around them. He stares back as Eren stares at him. Eren’s hands fiddle together where they rest just off his lap, tongue twisting along the inside of his cheek as he tries to think of how to say what he wants to say. But the thing is, he isn’t even quite sure _what_ he wants to say. It’s just — the mobile troops headquarters outside of Trost’s interior gates, the chaos in Stohess District, the way it had felt to see the world from the shoulder of a Titan, small and helpless, the way Jean looked at him the night before, atop Wall Rose in the belly of the night …

“Come here,” Jean husks.

He doesn’t have to ask twice. Eren is across the room in four quick steps to lock the door at the bolt and in another four quick steps he is at the side of Conny’s bed, nudges Jean’s legs out of the way to stand between them, knees bumping the bedframe, as he closes his arms tight around his shoulders and smashes his face into the clean sweetness of Jean’s hair at the top of his head.

Slowly, but not from reluctance, as if he wants to take joy in every inch of it, Jean’s arms circle around him in turn, circling and circling until they are locked as far as they can go around his middle. Squeezing. Holding. His thumbs stroke wrinkles into Eren’s shirt as they press into his sides. And Eren can feel his heartbeat, he can feel his breath, he can feel the warm autumn sun pooling in through the tall window and outside there are birds chirping, voices echoing from the arcades, and Jean mumbles something into Eren’s chest and Eren doesn’t care that he doesn’t hear what it is, he just wiggles a little, jabs at Jean’s leg with his knee to get him to move out of the way so he can sag down to sit beside him on the bed without letting go, burying his face into Jean’s strong shoulder.

The bed creaks only enough for permission as their weight shifts and Jean coaxes Eren back up. Breath, shivering in the tension between parted lips and little inhales of hesitation — not for lack of want, but indulgence in familiar sensual anticipation on which Eren wants to stay drunk for a longing moment or two. Torture himself, just sit there _knowing_ Jean is right there, right there and alive and Jean bumps his nose with his own. Finally Eren tips his chin enough so that when their mouths close, it is together.

Sweet, gentle little kiss, a simple press of the lips fitting together perfectly through yearning memory recollection. Jean’s mouth is cool on the outside, but not far beyond it is warm and tempting. Eren presses further; Jean lets him lead the kiss a moment before pressing back. Slow, breathless, tender. Hearts stuttering, stomachs pinching. Luscious, lustrous relief and release. And then — maybe it’s Eren’s fault, he has never really known how to stop — they are woven together sitting on the edge of Conny’s bed, kissing deep but hard, lazy but fervent, full of feeling, resplendent with reprieve. Jean’s fingers are in his hair, feet planted and thighs firm support for Eren as he straddles his lap. Jean issues a startled little grunt from the back of his throat, flutter of lashes as he casts Eren one of his patented glances of obligatory reproof.

Balk all he wants, Eren can feel him below his hips. Turned on. Defenselessly. Eager because Eren has given him permission and Eren has been off limits for weeks.

Because a brush with death is an exhilarating one. Almost dying renders a strange sort of purity of feeling and carnal craving a man can’t understand until he … well, until he almost dies.

Every now and again, there are footsteps and voices too close for comfort, passing by out in the hall — they freeze, brace to rip apart and unlock the door. But no one interrupts. Not when Eren fumbles to pull the rest of Jean’s shirt open, let his fingers reminisce with the familiar skin, the shiver of tight muscles, faint blond treasure trail. Not when Jean plucks the buttons at the front of Eren’s pants, nor when Eren clambers back up from his knees wiping his mouth, or when his body clenches and his arms lock around Jean’s shoulders and Jean clutches his hips tight enough to leave bruises like fingerprints as he eases up and Eren eases down at the best angle they can manage. Eren breathes through it, through clenched teeth, tightens his fingers in Jean’s shirt at his shoulder blades and kisses him to swallow Jean’s nervous little moans, pressing the toes of his shoes to the floor to keep balance on his lap while trying not to let bunched-up pants get in the way of fumbling impromptu intimacy. Sex.

Their souls may march at times to different beats of different war drums, but their bodies roll in the same fond, wistful rhythm of surrender.

The last time they did this was the night before everything changed, and the desperation this time is so much more affectionate, in unison, and it is union, or reunion, or communion —

“Fuck … ” Face flushed and breath still coming in little huffs as he flops back on Conny’s bed, Jean throws an arm over his head like he doesn’t want to watch Eren swipe the last of the sticky off his inner thigh and rub it off somewhere on his pants like it’s not exactly what it is, as if this nonchalant act is too unclassy for Jean’s city boy sensibilities. Like he does not want the reminder of what they’ve just done either because he wants to pretend it’s an inconvenience or because he’s reluctant to admit how weak he is for it. Whose come it is, his or Jean’s, Eren isn’t sure, they tried very hard to be neat about it, but it’s never foolproof even when one decides to lay down instead of keep going sitting perched on the edge of the bed. Which is fun at first, unmitigated disaster and cramping muscles soon thereafter.

Eren snorts with a playful roll of the eye, gives a little hop and shimmy to get his pants back up and button them. “It’s fine, Mikasa and I are doing laundry later, anyway,” he says, about his pants.

“Fuck,” Jean mumbles again, through a feeble little sigh of the post-sex daze.

Eren stands beside the bed, looking down at him. The gentle rise and fall of his chest, unbuttoned collar, one knee drawn up and sagging to the side as the other stretches out to the foot of the bed. The perfect angle of his jaw and the parting of that God damn perfect mouth for another white lie sigh of exasperation. Eren smiles, while Jean can’t see it. He says, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Conny we did it on his bed.”  

Jean throws his arm down and flashes Eren a look of betrayed mortification. His eyes dart around, searching for any sign on the bedding of their presence, before swerving back to Eren again. “Why the fuck would you even, ever?” he sputters.

Eren laughs, smacking at Jean’s foot. “Don’t you have a statement to make today, too?”

Jean groans, dragging his hands down his face. “Why do you always do this to me?”

“Do what?”

“I don’t know … ”

“Don’t blame me if you’re late.”

“ _How_ do you always do this to me?”

Eren pushes Jean’s hands away from his face so he can lean down and dust a kiss along his forehead. Jean’s brow knots; he looks up at him in an endearingly inquisitive fashion, as if he did not expect such an affectionate gesture from him.

Eren leaves him straightening up in the sunlight through the multipaned window, slipping out into the hall again still a little weak with comedown, and nursing the usual dull and temporary throb inside with each light, clear-headed step. Funny how good, well deserved and long awaited sex can just revivify a man —   

“Jäger.”

Eren stops with a scrape of the heel, turning to Captain Levi where he stands at the corner at the other end of the hall. Fuck. He does not realize he’s holding his breath until he’s dizzy in a different way; eyes wide, he says, “Yes, sir?”

The Captain gives a little incline of the chin, tip of the head, eyes sharp and penetrative over his dark jacket and crossed arms. That look on his face is like he can see every secret tally marked in Eren’s soul and for a moment Eren is flustered and horrified he knows exactly what he’s just done but —

“We need to talk,” Captain Levi says quietly, disappearing back around the corner confident Eren will hurry after him, diffident as he always is yet has never really been until suddenly being in the company of his childhood hero.

“About Conny’s statement,” the Captain’s voice drifts. “Hanji’s waiting. Let’s go.”

 

 

**end ch. ii**


	3. like real people do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which they are not yet fugitives, but on the run, and Mikasa says _I know what you and Eren do_ and Jean says _Maybe this was a mistake_ and Eren says _Do you remember the linden hop?_ And Jean looks so god damn handsome in his circle-brimmed hat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> early update because i’m off to **katsucon** this weekend! and it’s one of my fave chapters, too; **tw:** blood, **tw:** vomit (these are really brief mentions of such)  
>  song pairing - **london grammar** | _metal & dust_, **the hoosiers** | _a sadness runs through him_ , **vienna ditto** | _la nina blanca_ , **samovar russian folk music ensemble** | _ukhar kupyets_ , **hozier** | _like real people do_
> 
> // [spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/12169251584/playlist/2OZGUINyfg1GaXNij4rlQ7?si=vzwFdW9nTZS_QXrAVERStw)

iii. LIKE REAL PEOPLE DO

* * *

Under the jurisdiction of the interior, a blonde-haired girl with a firm jaw and prominent nose sleeps like a fairy tale princess in crystallized carbon.

Nothing is what it previously seemed, and it is a Pyrrhic victory. 

The public is a hornet’s nest, stirred on a sweltering summer day. They cannot know the ways in which paradigms have jolted. They cannot know _anything_. And the secrets poise the blade of the guillotine over the neck of the Survey Corps. Perhaps it is the government that is the hornet’s nest, full of threats and closed-door meetings, and the Corps holds the stick with which to knock it from the branches. The timing must be perfect. The movement must be exact.

***

They are not fugitives — not yet — but they are on the run, in hiding like rabbits in the warren from foxes.

The cabin is in, effectively, the middle of nowhere, not-so-distant mountains cradling the horizon purple and blue as the perfect trees for climbing sweeten the air in patches of pine needles. The discreet cabin is surrounded by a low, crumbling Krolvashire stone wall. Inside, blond pine wood paneling and sun-faded floorboards, unassuming brick hearth and cast-iron cooker. The road to the yard is barely a road and more an extended, winding rut in the earth, full of bumps and pits that jostle the foodstuffs in the wagon as Armin and Jean and Sasha arrive from the nearest hamlet, teasing Sasha about her lack of self-control and if she’s ever eaten horse during a food shortage.

“Oh my God!” she sputters, mare’s braid bouncing from shoulder to shoulder as she looks between them, aghast.

“Wipe your shoes!” Eren demands as they come in, gesturing with both hands which, with a broom handle in his fists, is more a frantic jab of the stiff bristles. “The Captain wants the place spotless — ”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jean says through a hard laugh much more liken to his good old lofty scoffs, throwing down a sack of barley by the crate of root vegetables. “This place is empty most of the year, spotless is a little extreme of an expectation. What, you want me to make my bed, too?”

Eren gives him a look as if Jean has lost his mind. “ _Yes_ ,” he stresses.

“Who are you, my mom?”

“Captain Levi likes things orderly — ”

“Oh my God, Eren, just suck his dick already.”

“Oh, fuck you, Kirschtein!”

The windows are open to usher in the autumn, shoo away the thick, dead smell of stale air in a cabin usually closed-up like a coffin. Jean makes a nasty face for Eren’s unquestioning submission to the Captain, where he thinks Eren can’t see it. But Eren does, and he makes a nasty face back, and they bicker, and Mikasa and Historia come in lugging armfuls of stove wood.

“Eren!” Armin rebukes, twisting around from the ice box where he arranges a few cannisters of milk and paper-wrapped cheese with a dance of the messy blond hair, a look of impatient disapproval. “She’s supposed to be resting! Mikasa, come on … ”

“I tried to stop her,” Eren insists, and no one disbelieves him. “She even did calisthenics this morning.”   

“How would you know, you peeping on her?” Jean laughs.

Eren’s eyes spark off him, lip curling at what to others might seem a trivial jab but is really just the absurd but quite typical blows and indictments of lovers’ quarrels. “Oh, sure,” he retorts. “Yup, definitely was.” 

They pick at each other because they are both on edge, of course; it’s what they do best. But that doesn’t mean Eren isn’t actually driving Jean absolutely mad.  

“Look out, Mikasa,” he scoffs, patronizing and snide, “it’s not the Titan Eren you have to look out for, it’s the pathetic raging teenage hormones one.”

The others laugh, except for Mikasa, of course, and except for Eren, who throws Jean a surly look, aggressively annoyed and devoid of patience, not that Eren has much purview over patience, anyway. “Really, Jean?” he says with the kind of disdainful laugh that only makes arguments worse. “Seriously?”

Jean knows that one was particularly pointless and petty, and admittedly not very clever, but he can’t take it back. He just flashes Eren a dark glance of something not quite apology and issues a limp shrug before going back outside to get the last of the supplies.

“You know … ” Sasha’s saying as he comes back in. She grins, in that spacey way of hers, dimples and no fear of what people think of her raspy voice and innocent willfulness. She gives a huff of a sigh to get loose hair out of her face. “It kind of feels like we’re recruits again,” she says, big brown eyes flickering up to the rest of them. 

Yes. Yes, it does.

Working in the kitchen and catching their breath back then after intense trials of talent and willpower, everyone teasing, and joking, and laughing. This harkens to halcyon days.

And it haunts Jean a bit, just a quick shiver of the good old resentment of self, private pains and fatal flaws — unnerving, how they can be so happy and relaxed as if they do not have so much blood on their hands and will soon plunge their fists into more. It almost feels like a punishment. A cruel joke, a fever dream, a trial on their souls, a wish that won’t come true.

There is one voice missing from the fun.

Eren has his back to them, sweeping still. His shoulders bunched, head low. But from this side of the kitchen, Jean catches a glimpse of the way he drearily watches the moving broom — mouth in a thin line, lashes lowered on dim and distracted eyes. Maybe he feels it, too. The injustice and falsity of this reprieve. There is something distant in him since Trost, distant and disjointed. As if — Captain Levi’s first squad, Annie, and Reiner, and Berthold, the Commander’s arm, all the innocent, unprepared, unexpecting ones along the way — as if any of that is truly his fault.

***

In all truth, though, it has been weeks and nothing feels real yet. Maybe nothing will feel real ever again. Or maybe it’s just that reality has shifted.

Jean is at once grateful and livid to be assigned to watchman with Conny as the superiors run their experiments with Eren. On Eren. He does not want to be away from him. It’s difficult to place his trust in people who do not know Eren as well as he does. And yet he cannot bear to be there to watch. He can barely withstand hearing the shouts and orders, tiny and faraway down below, through the trees and over the drop off — the shudder of Titan vocal chords, ringing so coarse and inhuman, and the way he can recognize Eren’s frustration even in the monstrous sound.

At least Mikasa and Armin are there.

Jean went upstairs, only once, on the first day, to the bigger loft room in the cabin, the one with the single bed and angled ceiling. It was a mistake. It was Eren shaking in bed, the room hazy with the steam of Titan biotics, Eren’s body seizing up as he vomited thick and dark and full of blood clots, into the bedpan almost faster than Mikasa could scrape it to his side. Eren, wide bloodshot eyes and epistaxis, whistling breaths every time the skin is creeping back over cartilage and browbone, claw marks of Titan sinew and muscle fiber down the apples of his cheeks. The windows are cracked to clear the heat of the steam as a wooden soldier burns up, burns alive, burns into life. The pungent perfume of camphor and burnt vinegar is familiar, but there is another curious smell in the haze, a foreign one. Sweet iron tang, earthy. Like the burning of bodies in reverse.

It’s almost worse to see the fear in Mikasa, cold and fully defined, because it means his own fears are justified. He hates her for letting this happen, even though she has no control over it. He hates the Captain and the Squad Leader and the others for their soldier’s knack for stifling emotion, or at least presenting themselves that way. He hates Eren for having to do this and he hates himself for his helplessness.

“He’s trying so hard,” Mikasa murmurs on the third afternoon, just her voice from the other side of the clothesline where she and Jean are in the yard hanging laundry to dry. “They pushed him too much the first day, so yesterday and today he struggled a lot.”

Sasha is out with Conny, patrolling the area. Armin has been tasked with shadowing Squad Leader Hanji in her meetings with her small crew, her observations, her transcription of notes.

Jean nods and shrugs at the same time, a clothespin between his teeth, flapping wrinkles out of a wet sheet before tossing it to drape over the line.

Mikasa’s face appears in the space between linen, soft cheeks and smooth chin, dark almond eyes framed in lovely darker lashes halting Jean in place as she peers at him with that grim intensity of hers.

“I know what you and Eren do,” she says, flatly, with no room for feigned ignorance.

 _You and Eren_ …

Jean’s heart bottoms out through his chest; panic throbs once, and then subsides, leadens in his gut. He opens his mouth to insist otherwise, to make clear misconceptions and misunderstandings, and the clothespin falls because he forgot it was there. He juggles to catch it, face hot, neck hot, and he gawks back at Mikasa wishing he is not somehow so relieved to know she knows.

“I … ” is all he can manage.

Her eyes flicker away and she stoops to pluck up another piece of laundry, her touch so delicate and kind for all the destruction she is capable of wielding.

“It’s okay,” she says next, through the sheets. And she means it. She also means, _Don’t you dare hurt him. Or I’ll hurt you_.

Jean swallows, mouth chalky.

“I’m glad,” she says after that.

Something clenches in the pit of Jean’s chest.

“That he has you.”

“Mikasa … ”

There is no injury of betrayal or envy in her eyes as she curls her fingers on the laundry line and leans there smiling at him, head tipped just slightly. And she looks so young, and she looks so harmless, dark hair falling in and around her red scarf, and braided naturally with the feel of true honesty is a small heartache, like resignation that for however determined she has been and still is to give Eren all he needs, there are just some things she must accept she cannot provide.

Jean swallows again, hard. And he has always been afraid, he realizes, that Mikasa would resent him for somehow stealing Eren from her. That is not what he intended to do and that is not what he wants to do. He wants to say, _I’m sorry he chose me over you_. He wants to say, _You mean so much to him_. But he doesn’t know how to explain what he’s feeling.

“Do you love him?” Jean husks, ashamed to look at her. Hurting her feels like disgracing something holy and he is loath to know that he has, if he has.

“Yes,” she answers as she goes back to the laundry, with savage simplicity, with a protective, satisfied — perhaps even spiteful — sort of confidence and pride. Because she knows that in the same way, although they are bound together by this shared secret, there are parts of Eren that are hers, and will never be his. Armin, too. _Yes_ , she says. Jean does not know how she loves him, in which way. He does know he has no right to begrudge it or even ask about it. _You don’t know him like I do_ , is what she didn’t say aloud. She’s right. And she is clearly glad for that, too.

“He’ll be okay,” she says after a long moment, voice tiny and thin.

They are both desperate for distraction from the steam slithering out of open attic windows, from the occasional muffled growling moan it carries.

Jean waits for Mikasa to look at him. She does, actually; she trusts him with her secrets, he realizes. _He’ll be okay_. And she understands he needs to hear it as much as she does, even if they are only trying to convince each other. But, in a way, that is enough. It is enough to share in something unspoken with Mikasa, the same sterling strive to protect their wild-eyed maniac and all his most precious smiles.

***

Eren knows Jean’s shadow as it slips in through the kitchen door and pauses to tap heel and toe to shake loose dirt from his shoes before stepping inside; Eren practically slides on socked feet across the kitchen to cut him off there at the door, hands out to catch himself against the counter with one while the other stretches out to block Jean from coming any further.

“Boo!” he half-whispers, half-hisses, unable to prevent the puckish grin as it breaks across his face.

“The fuck — ” Jean stutters out through a sharp breath, staggering back just a step or two and grabbing the door again to steady his balance with a clatter of the rifle slung over his shoulder, a scuff of the feet on the creaking floors. He is a disgruntled silhouette against the moonlight through the door, smelling of crisp autumn darkness and lingering tobacco smoke. One of Hanji’s squad members brought a whole carton of rolling paper and bundle of leaves, a gift for everyone for all their hard work, he said. More like condolences, maybe. Premature, or overdue.

It is near fucking impossible to find a moment alone in this cramped little cabin, even with Hanji’s squad camping along a perimeter not far away as first line of watch and defense. 

Past Jean’s shoulder, Conny’s little shadow bounds up into the cabin’s pseudo watch tower, a raised platform of old wooden slats and boards, wool knit cap tugged low over his ears to keep warm in the mountain night as he takes over the watch shift from which Jean is returning.  

“You’re wearing my hat,” Jean mutters, shrugging the firearm off his shoulder and giving Eren a skeptical look. Nose wrinkled, face pinched, good old Kirschtein disdain. “Why are you wearing my hat?”

“Because.” Eren runs pinched fingers along the brim of it, the black brimmed hat, smirking at Jean through the darkness in the kitchen. “I like your stupid hat. It looks good on you. Man, I want to go outside _so bad_ … ”

“ _Someone’s_ feeling better,” Jean remarks below his breath. It’s true; Eren’s sleep schedule may be all sorts of off, but he is feeling better. “And you can’t,” Jean says next, sternly. He grabs a pile of warm clothes he left on the table for when his watch shift was over. _Go outside_ … “You know that. I’m not sneaking you out, so stop giving me those eyes.”

Eren sits by him in the narrow, pine-paneled washroom, as Jean readies for much-deserved sleep, considering they have four hours until Captain Levi will wake them to cook breakfast. To stay disciplined and all. He can feel how tired Jean is as he just sits by him with knees drawn to his chest, still wearing his hat. There are no windows here, so a low hand lamp is fine, rusty faucet and steam pipe, squat bench for when an inhabitant is not in hiding and can actually utilize the steam closet for its intended use.

“Would not recommend,” Jean mumbles as he washes his face and his neck and under his arms, body bristled against the cold water.

“What?” Eren asks.

“Catching someone as they pass out.”

Eren frowns — it’s almost a pout, a sullen little side glance and jut of the jaw. Yes, right, because he’d gotten up too quickly yesterday, too quickly after a night recovering, and he’d gone downstairs for some water, some coffee, something, and Jean had been at the table helping copy some of Moblit’s sketches from the experiments, charcoal and pencil, with a sour look on his face, and — and Eren had seen a flash of a woman’s face in his mind’s eye, just a flash, like sunlight glinting off glass, like the darting shadow of a bird flitting by, a woman’s face and his father’s broad, tall back. Nausea had slammed him abrupt and hard and as his heart started to race with it, throat tighten up, he’d stumbled and tried to go for the sink, but then the world had swerved horribly off kilter and the next thing he knew, he was on the floor blinking up at Moblit and Armin and Hanji and Jean had his arm under him and Nifa was calling up the stairs, “Captain! Captain, come down!”

Eren follows Jean back out into the dark kitchen from the washroom, floor cold under socked feet, autumn chill creeping at the windowpanes. He hoists himself up to sit on the table as Jean drapes his towel over the back of a chair to dry overnight.

“Captain and Hanji are in their room tonight, they won’t know if you come sleep with me,” Eren suggests in half a whisper, feet hooked at the ankles and swinging idly as he basks in the soft, handsome, weary way Jean looks in the silver of moonlight through cloud cover.

“Yeah … no.” Jean rolls his head side to side to stretch his neck, draws a hissing breath through teeth clenched against chattering, chilled to the core from the cold wash-up. “No. I don’t think so. They’ll find out. They always know everything.”

Eren’s face pinches; his feet fall still and he scowls darkly at Jean where Jean sighs and crosses his arms, scooting closer to the wood stove in the event it still pockets a little bit of warmth from dinner hours earlier.

“Why don’t you come up and see me?” Eren demands, and it is the real question he wanted to ask.

Jean frowns at his feet a moment, huddled in his jumper. “Because I don’t want to, Eren,” he husks, looking up at him solemnly through his lashes, without lifting his chin.  

“Ouch,” Eren scoffs. “I know I don’t look too pretty after experiments, but damn, Kirschtein … ”

“You know that’s not what I mean,” Jean replies brusquely. “I just can’t see you like that.”

 _Like that_.

It is not clear on Eren why that reverberates through the shell of his chest like the boom of a cannonball. Perhaps it’s remorse and shame and the crisis of confidence of late. A secondhand misery, as the ache of one heart always infects its other half. Or maybe it’s just the blameful way in which Jean says it, and that his own defective defense mechanism always swings to insolence.    

They say that doing the same thing time and time again expecting something different is the definition of madness. That does not necessarily mean it isn’t admirable, a commitment to hoping for something new.

“You should have just gone to the interior,” Eren snaps.

Jean rears back, spurned by this spite, how degrading it is to be wrongfully condemned and consigned to that pit of snakes. A low blow, in other words.

“Ouch?” he says, echoing Eren earlier, but with far less buoyancy and much more injured disbelief as he gives Eren a dark look.  

“I’m serious,” Eren sneers. No, he’s not serious; he’s being trivial and vindictive because he feels guilty and he’s losing his breath because at the same time Jean makes him falter out of helpless frustration, he forges his resolve in steel, and the thing is, it is very difficult to work together with someone you’re having sex with, but much more difficult to work with someone you’re in love with.

“That way you’d be safe and have it easy,” he continues to scorn, unable to desist, “instead of just being a sheep — ”

“Fuck you, Eren,” Jean edges out, hazel sparking off amber as his narrowed eyes clash with Eren’s sharp and duly affronted for the blatant and injurious disrespect. He chokes out a short, harsh sound like a scoff trying to be a laugh or a laugh fading into a scoff, then remembers to keep his volume low, though his fury is obvious. Smoldering, abrasive Kirschtein temper.  

“Safe and easy, huh?” he spits. “Sounds great. But, clearly, as we’re discovering, that’s just fairy tales and brainwashing … ” He doesn’t even try to defuse Eren, like he’s relishing in the fight, misses the fight, uses the fight for his own sake. Prove something. Satisfy his own self sabotage. “I — okay, I can’t take you seriously right now.” He reaches out and snatches his hat off Eren’s head, tosses it to the table behind him.

“Just wait,” Eren mutters crossly. “When we see the sea, you’ll be glad you joined the Corps — ”

“Oh my God, enough about the _sea!_ ”

Eren recoils, usual stubborn truculence fracturing.

“I don’t get it.” Jean waves his hands weakly. He is at once full of scrutiny and skepticism. “I don’t get _you_. We have so many different problems now than whether or not the ocean fucking exists!” 

“If you don’t care, that’s fine, but I do — ”  

“Are you happy I’m here, or do you not want me here?” Jean demands, breathily, so much better than Eren at being quiet, but his hunched shadow is just as rigid with simmering ire. Rightfully grave. Rightfully infuriated.

“Of _course_ I’m happy you’re here, asshole.”

“Can’t you just act like a normal person for one second?”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Eren slides down off the edge of the table and lands with a gentle thud of socked feet, bristled and ready for the fight.

“God damn it, Eren,” Jean says, ardent in a sharpened way, reluctant austerity, “I can’t _lose you_.” 

Something cold and impatient tightens in Eren’s spine. He gives him a look, dismayed. _Can’t lose you_ … It sparks in him an uncertainty, a vague sense of insecurity, makes him feel small and insignificant in unknown environs and taste a bitter doubt he has tasted more than enough since the attack on Trost, he hates the way it coats his mouth —

“Maybe this won’t work.”

Eren blinks, a flutter of lashes, as if it has any effect on him comprehending what he’s just heard.

Jean stands there, between him and the stove, tousled hair and broad shoulders drooping in the dark now, arms up as his hands slide wearily along the sides of his own neck, slip to the back of it as if trying to coax the tension out of his muscles.

“What?” Eren breathes through a low hum of distress.

Jean feels very estranged from him, suddenly. And he is not selfish enough to ignore it is by his own hand. 

Limply, Jean shrugs. He mutters, “Maybe we were naïve and stupid and this is a mistake. Maybe it’s just too much to be in — ”

Be in what?

Eren does not ask for clarification.

“To do this,” Jean rephrases quickly, licking his lips, clearing his throat. Little shadow of a cynical, self-effacing smirk. He doesn’t seem to want to mean it. It is just his regressive panic, a relapse to the good old days, reactionary and refractionary. “You and me. Maybe it’s too much to be together when we’re actually at war. Not that we have any idea who we’re fighting anymore, but … ”

“What are you getting at, like, _not_ doing things together anymore?” Eren practically chokes on the words, baffled, and adamant, heart thudding hollow and desperate somewhere deep in his chest. “It’s not like we’re dating,” he adds with great contempt for the institution of courtship. “We’re just, you know, _together_ — ”

There is no other way to articulate it. It’s just an unspoken truth; they have never tried to apply ramifications to it; there has never been any need and there doesn’t seem to be now except Jean’s bullshit insistence that their closeness is problematic. But the trouble is that Jean always lies by omission and deflection about the way he feels, and Eren has no check on his own wild force of feeling.

But it puts things into perspective, really.

To be in love — is it cumbersome, or does it unencumber one, to have something to protect, to look forward to, to fight for, other than bloodlust or the struggle to survive another day?   

“I don’t want to hold you back,” Jean presses, but it’s curt and unfeeling, seems like a cheap shot. Exploitation of Eren’s determination for the sake of his own gall and wormwood, faulting Eren for his own feelings of inadequacy. Like he is not the one who has always pushed him away when he gets comfortable, pushes Eren away so that he’s just out of reach when he tries to reach for him again because the only thing Jean has surety in is his lack of surety.

“No,” Eren snaps, a spiteful little laugh that is as empty and flat as it sounds. He can’t keep his tongue in check. He cannot relent. “It’s too late for that. You’re too emotionally invested at this point. As much as you want others to disbelieve it, you do care about things, you know — ”

“Yeah, and that hasn’t seemed to help me much, has it?” 

“You’re just blaming me for how you’re afraid of being alone.”

“Wow. Thanks. I didn’t ask for that.”

“That’s not my responsibility!”  

“I never said it was, asshole. _Stop_.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop looking at me like I’m this heretic to some fucked-up cult of courage, or something!”

Eren knows he is impossible to reason with, exhausting and inexhaustible. He just wants Jean to prove he is still willing to chase him. Which is kind of cruel and manipulative, but is it really if he doesn’t know he does it? Does that make it honorable, or pathetic — ?

“Maybe you’re right!” he sneers, heedless invective, but there is much less resolve here than there would have been six months ago, something in him is shaken and shaky and inexperienced with fear. “Let’s just take a break, then. Let’s not do things together. I can’t afford to be distracted, and you’ll just end up putting yourself in danger — ”

“You know what one of the last things you said to me was? Before you fucking _died_?” Jean says. “That you don’t need me. That I’m not the point of your life. Killing all the titans is.”

“I mean, it — ”

“Well, guess what, Eren?” Jean shrugs and shakes his head at the same time, arms out and hands open. Complacent, but in a thin, shallow way that is resigned and stingingly passive. God, it rubs Eren every wrong way when he acts this way.

Though, maybe he has no right to disdain it, considering how wildly the circumstances around the two of them have swung off pole.

“At this point,” Jean husks, “after everything, you’re the point of _mine_. And if we lose you, I don’t have anything else.”

 _You’re the point of mine_.

Eren’s heart lurches. He sets his teeth, a shout crowding his mouth that he struggles to bite back for the sake of privacy, pathetic as it might be here (and already compromised for all their venom and vigor down here in the kitchen). “Shut up, that’s not true, and if it is, I don’t want it! You can’t depend on me — ”

“ _All of humanity is depending on you_ , Eren!” Jean seethes.

But he speaks with volume tightly clipped between clenched teeth and it makes the accusation all the more impactful. Stripped of drama and reduced to just the words and their meanings, their smooth, articulated shapes, all sharpened into the point of an arrow that pierces Eren’s soul swift and unforgiving.

The cabin is silent, so silent. No sign of anyone rousing to tell them to shut the fuck up, so either someone’s awake and just wants them to duke it out, or they don’t care. If they stay still and quiet together, they might hear the creak and whine of wooden boards out at the watch tower platform, where Conny huddles in his coat and yawns into the cold night. The rustle of wind through the trees. A distant owl calling in too-late warning against querulous words, reckless acrimony, displaced and misplaced and stifled worries twisted in their isolation into bitter impatience and friendly fire. But they do not. After so many weeks on end, they have the luxury now to lash out, on separate quests for catharsis. Setting fire to the space between rhyme and reason, between principle and practicality.

The fact of the matter is that they are two sides of the same coin, a catastrophic and dynamic commonality.

That is not necessarily a bad thing.

In the quiet, they sit on opposite sides of the table. Eren slouched low, fingers picking at each other where they peek out of his sweater sleeves, eyes downcast and dull. Jean, across from him, slouched forward on the table, propped with folded arms. He looks bruised inside; Eren feels hollowed out inside.

Slowly, Jean stretches out a hand, gesturing for Eren’s.

Not any faster, Eren reaches out in turn. Jean’s fingers, cold, just vaguely roughened by the raw bite of the night, turn his hand palm-up and lay it gently flat so he can trace idle circles and crosshatches along Eren’s heart and life line.

“I’m doing my best,” he says, whisper threadbare but not yet ragged.

Eren nods idly, watching Jean’s fingers as they trail shivers on his skin. “Me, too,” he murmurs.

“It’s just … ” Jean’s hand falls still and he frowns at it, brow pinching deep. He does not look up, but Eren can feel he longs to. This is not the same as his feigned indifference. This is something raw and real, and honorably honest.

“You’re not mine anymore,” he says. “Because heroes belong to no one.”

And for perhaps only the second time in his life, if that, it blows through Eren like a cold wind — that, really, how selfish should he be to expect others to so willingly worship his own merciless maxims?

“Jean,” he says, voice paper-thin on his lips.

“Hmm?”

“Jean, look at me.”

Jean looks up, slowly, with just his eyes, and he looks so pathetically pensive and young and uncertain, and through every fault of his own.

 _Take a break_. It’s almost laughable. Like they are dating like real people do.  

“I’m not going to leave you,” Eren whispers.

Jean stares at him, wearied. It’s Eren’s fault; Eren accepts that. He never claimed to be a saint. He commends Jean for even still putting up with him. Tousled hair and thin line of the mouth, hazel eyes moving over Eren in short, peaceful little darts, Jean doesn’t say anything, doesn’t address it. Just buries it for later consideration, in another private plot of the graveyard of all his considerations, the repository of rue and regrets.

Finally, he sighs and gives Eren’s hand a little tap of a high-five before pulling back. He huddles forward into his crossed arms a moment, before rising slowly to his feet. “Okay,” he says. “I’m really tired … I was tired already, and you wear me the fuck out.”

Eren’s smile livens a little in ownership of the crime.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better, but you should really get as much sleep as you can,” Jean adds. It sounds like surrender to something but Eren does not know to what he is giving way. He does not think that the longing way with which Jean looks at him is a longing for him, particularly, and if it is not, he’s not sure what it’s for. 

“Look at you, all responsible and shit,” Eren half-whispers back.

Jean smirks weakly, casts Eren one last lingering glance before leading the way up the stairs to the attic rooms. They go their separate ways where the stairwell parts for the single-bed room and the tiny room in which Armin sleeps soundly and Mikasa sleeps too lightly and Sasha issues little kitten snores now and again.

Eren climbs into his bed, in the cold, dark loft room, some mattress coils biting at his knees as he nestles down into the blankets and curls up into his own hands and arms, into the sweet, warm scent of Jean that lingers there on his skin.  

He dreams of a woman who looks quite a lot like himself, and she is staring at him through her mirror as she brushes her hair.

***

Fitting, that they should discuss the tragedy of the truth at dinner on Jour des Morts, the day to remember dead loved ones, as the sun turns the sky hot pink fading past the mountain peaks.

The hair-covered Titan. Titans springing forth seemingly from the earth within the Walls. Minister Nick was murdered. Eren cannot carbonize his Titan self.

They must seal the hole in Wall Maria.

Captain Levi allows them to move the dining table out of the way to make room for celebration.

“Quietly,” he instructs, standing with knotted arms and watching them as they take needles and thread and canvas and sticks and piece together little dolls for the holiday. It’s clear he already meant to permit them a good time, considering he sent two members of Hanji’s squad to bring back materials and liquor and a little accordion which Moblit is apparently very talented with. Sent them and suggested they mention a different location within earshot of any military figures in order to throw them off their scent a little more. He even knew, somehow, that Conny plays folk guitar. And still everyone gives Eren pouty looks of uncertainty when he insists the Captain cares about them.

“We’ll celebrate _quietly_ ,” Captain Levi reiterates. They are, after all, supposed to be laying low.

Quiet is a matter of perspective. Sort of. In Eren’s opinion.

Moblit’s fingers fly on the accordion as he sways side to side in quarter time. Conny plays percussion with heel and palm, stomps and claps, while Hanji fiddles curiously with the folk guitar. In town, there will be candles and ritual, banners waving from window and balcony and the pitched roofs of wattle and daub houses; in the cabin, there are shouts and laughter as Sasha tries to keep up with Conny’s ever-quickening tempo in her hunter’s hymn tap dance, cheeks puffed in determination even as she begins to run out of breath and starts to trip. Historia braids Mikasa’s hair in little pieces, sitting off to the side by a warm lamp, and Mikasa laughs and claps along as Armin pulls Eren into the center of the room for the Southern Czarl’ston. Deftly, Moblit switches to the right key, the right campy, unraveling of notes, and Conny grabs the folk guitar and his fingers slide down the strings with a happy whine as he jumps into the melody with Moblit. Hanji cheers them on with a lift of oak-aged herbal liqueur in toast. They turn in circles, arms hooked, managing somehow to stay pretty in unison with the stomps, the squats, the kicks, the body twists bouncing on their toes.

Even staid Captain Levi sits over in the kitchen drinking a small pour of honey beer from a pewter cup, smiling a faint pinch of a smile and watching with hooded eyes.

Sweaty and panting, Eren flops down with Armin onto the hard window bench, with its thin, useless cushions. Armin laughs, claps to the beat still, sitting forward against his knees. Everyone is in stifled cheer as Mikasa kicks off her shoes and shoves Jean into the makeshift dance floor, proceeds to elbow him into a loose mountain tango.

Eren knows this dance. Mikasa taught it to him a long, long time ago. On a summer day out in one of the residential courtyards, those little nooks and crannies of jumbled streets and alleyways running through Shiganshina like spiderwebs. She said her father taught it to her, while she stood tiny and light as a feather on the tops of his feet.   

Apparently Jean knows this dance, too, but he stumbles a bit at first, rusty with the footwork and lack of practice. More unpracticed in dancing with a girl. Let alone Mikasa. Never mind the fact that he looks at her as if they have a secret.

For most of it, Mikasa is wide-eyed and unsmiling, staring hard at Jean like she dares him to mess up. Hip turns and footwork and her long skirt flows about her legs. But when the third dip comes around, she points her toe and she throws her head back and her dark hair falls out of her eyes, out of her lashes and away from the scar on the apple of her cheek, and she is laughing like Eren has not seen her laugh in a long time. He has not seen Jean laugh so freely in a long time, either, his hair tousled and his legs lanky and limber, stomp-tap of the heel and toe.

Mikasa almost trips jumping out of the center, face flushed and eyes dancing. She plops down next to Eren, too. Conny jumps in. Sasha pushes Jean out of the way so she can do the jive with Conny. Hanji puts their footwork to shame, and it means so much to Eren to see her eyes dance the way they did when he first met her, her sleeves rolled up and glasses stretched to sit atop her head. Moblit seems to enjoy it, too, smiling fondly at her as he plays his little accordion, smiling at her like the moon smiles at the sun. Captain Levi leans back against the counter holding his hand across his mouth now, elbow propped on forearm, and Eren thinks it’s because he doesn’t want them to see how very much he enjoys their joy.   

Conny sticks out a hand for Historia to join him, face pinched and ears as red as his cheeks. She looks up at him, eyes wide. And then she takes his hand and lets him lead her tentative quickstep and tiptoeing, blonde hair coming loose about her temple and ears as laughter lights up her face.

Eren thumbs through a mental catalogue of the dances he knows. Czarl’ston, yes. A little bit of the jive. The mountain tango —

Eren pushes himself up off the window bench using both Armin’s knee and Mikasa’s knee for leverage, and he points at Jean where he stands against the wall still catching his breath, collar undone, sleeves rolled up. Jean’s smile falters; he raises his brows, points at himself, too. _Me?_

They haven’t really, after all, come to a consensus regarding the suggestion the other night.

 _Take a break_.

“You remember the linden hop?” Eren demands as Conny takes over on folk strings so Moblit can jive with Hanji, too. She leads him into the kitchen where the Captain tries to walk away but they trap him at the counter, and he just glares at them over his honey beer.

Jean stares at him a moment, mouth open. Suspicious, maybe. Or loath to acquiesce after the argument the other night. Stubbornly serious about torturing himself by extricating himself from the goodness of being together —

One of those classic Kirschtein charmer smirks rolls across his face and his answer is hooking Eren by one arm and spinning him right into the hop.

“Oh _nooo!_ ”

“Yes! Here we go!”

“The world must be ending, they’re working together — ”

Conny and Sasha elbow and smack each other as they heckle. Mikasa laughs, her eyes little crescent moons of lashes, clapping her hands together once and leaning into them as she leans into Armin and he whistles softly with fingers between his teeth.

A helter-skelter linden hop, joined with locked hands and free arms out and swinging. Bodies twisting right, twisting left. Bouncing footwork and little jumps. Spins, turns, pulling in, pulling out, leaning in, leaning out, Jean’s arm hooked around his waist to give Eren a spin, Eren ducking through. Laughter, laughter, scrape of the heel on floorboards, Jean’s face flushed and his eyes bright and his hair standing up at the cowlicks, and does he look at Jean this way, too? So absurdly trusting and enchanted, so absolutely in love —

 _Take a break_ …

Eren spins too hard and loses grip of Jean’s hand; Jean catches him before he can stumble into him by closing his arms around his middle and carrying through with the spin lest inertia drag them both down. It sweeps Eren’s feet off the floor and he curls forward, clutching Jean’s arms so as not to fall as the world spins, everything spins, Eren cocks back his head against Jean’s shoulder and laughs. His toes touch the floor again and they stumble apart, panting, laughing, everyone cheering. 

It is so, so blissfully easy to forget soldierhood, and trauma, the crisis of looming human extinction and sleeping traitors. All of them, together, just … _humans_.

Moblit leans back with legs crossed and starts to pluck away on the little folk guitar as the good cheer settles (the Captain demands it).

 _I promise you this_ , the lyrics to the song go, though no one sings them to life, _if you shut those weary eyes, it won’t take long_ … Humming along, Historia gets out the Jour des Morts dolls, and Armin the paper and stubs of pencil, with which they will write messages and wishes for the dead.

“I need some fresh air,” Eren moans, pressing himself up against the kitchen door with fingers poised to curl on the handle. He looks over at the Captain with as deserving a look as he can muster. It’s true, anyway. He needs fresh air.

“Not alone,” Captain Levi says from where he’s hoisted to sit on the counter with one leg drawn up, foot propped on the edge of it. Hanji leans next to him, trading off that oak-aged licorice-tasting liquor.

“That’s okay,” Eren rushes out on an elated breath just to have received permission, eyes wide. “Jean will come with.”

“What?” Jean says.

“Go to the stables,” Levi instructs.

Eren’s face pinches. “That’s hardly fresh air — ”

“Take your hats,” Levi says next, unmoved by the complaint.

Eren tugs low on his head the paneled page cap which the Captain orders he wear to hide his face any of the monitored times he goes outside, whether traveling to the experiment location or anything else. He pulls Jean’s dark brimmed hat off the hook next and tosses it across the way to him; Jean catches it, startled.

Mikasa’s eyes follow them as they slip outside into the cool, dark yard. Then again, her eyes always follow Eren. So does the music, faint and faraway like a dream as they hurry across the yard to the stables.

 _Hush your love, child, there’s so much that you’ve seen_ …

“Fuck that,” Eren says over his shoulder to Jean, jumping around the corner of the stables to lean against the outside of it, out of sight from the cabin. Inside the stalls, the few horses stir and whinny at their presence as if to greet them.

They stand in a simple silence for a while, just their slowing breaths in little clouds and Eren counting the inches between them — a hat, a cap, a wind in the deep green trees, a blanket of stars overhead.

 _Hush your mouth now of all those questions, questions_ …

It is a full moon tomorrow night. Eren can see all of Jean, washed in blues and greys. He stands with hands pressed behind him at the small of the back, head hung as idly he kicks and digs his toe into the cold dirt there, and Eren wonders what it is he is trying to bury. He doesn’t want to ask. In some bleak, bruised way, he thinks he knows. But maybe he doesn’t.

“It’s so nice out,” Jean murmurs.

“Yeah,” Eren murmurs back.

“I wish I could stop time.”

Eren slides his eyes back over to Jean again. His hat hides half his face. “Why?”

“I really like tonight.”

Slowly, Jean looks at him. Just a flicker of those hazel eyes under his hat, a little light in them that makes Eren blush. He opens his mouth to say something, but he’s not very good with words when he’s consciously trying to think of things to say. An apologetic smile plucks at Jean’s mouth because he is aware of that. That look in his eyes — in the half light — it makes Eren feel nervous.

_Maybe this is a mistake._

This is not a mistake — _they_ are not a mistake.

It is simply the changing seasons of the soul.

 _And I don’t know what the answer is_ … _to settle you down_ …  

Eren doesn’t have to move very much, just a hook step and a little craning up to catch that drooping smile in a kiss. Never mind all he said the night before; Jean yields immediately, arms winding around him, dragging him closer. At first it is something just shy of clinging, a little shift of the mouths, shivering breath. Eren just wants to be held. But then the pressure of Jean’s hands changes; Eren arches his body and kisses him harder, bumping the brim of Jean’s hat with the little lip of his own. He knots his arms around Jean’s neck, elbows propped on his shoulders. Jean’s hands slide open fingers, open palms, down Eren’s back, thumbs catching intentionally at the belt loops of his pants, down to give his ass the kind of gentle, sensual, affectionate grab that only lifts Eren to his toes a little, all the better to deepen the kiss with a dart of tongue along Jean’s lower lip when he doesn’t expect it. It may not be vindication, but it’s probably redemption.

Perhaps it is a weakness, but it is not a mistake.

“ _Mm_ … ” Jean hums, low and velvety in the back of his throat and releases his grip, lets Eren lower back down to flat foot, pivots him with his palms on his hips so now Eren is the one caged back against the wall of the stables. A horse stomps, as if to say, _I know what you’re doing out there_ …

Eren can taste in a mouthful the secret sadness that runs through Jean like a river, too vicious and rapid for him to cross.

“God, I hate you so much,” Jean whispers against the shell of his ear, and Eren knows he doesn’t mean it. He hates himself more than he hates Eren. Maybe he hates himself for not hating Eren. Eren can’t help but be galvanized by the claim; it excites him, plucks right at the heartstrings. And the luststrings. It’s like flirting. Maybe there’s something wrong with him.

He turns his head to nose Jean into another kiss on the mouth. Jean accepts it, a silent confession. Eren tilts his head back after, stars spinning over them as Jean trails slow, warm kisses down his neck and throat. His breath picks up again, delicate little puffs on the cold air; his blood quickens, his heart pinches in the dangerous sort of delight that infallibly becomes desire, impetuous and reckless and eager. He curls his fingers, uncurls his fingers, in Jean’s shirt near his navel, slips his fingers along into the waistband of his trousers, teasing, teasing, in a lazy and love-drunk sort of way. Good to know Jean is still as defenseless as he is, feels just as untouched as him — judging by how easily he is getting hard, pressed up against him. Responding like he has forgotten he has a body until Eren has touched it again.

“Nngh … ” It comes out as an impatient whimper, the moan Eren tries to grind away between his teeth. But it only breaks into a rosary of little gasps as Jean prompts a leg between his, body heat and purposeful pressure.  

And there is something quite lonesome about it all. Not lonely, but lonesome; the two are very different things.

Across the yard, the curtains are drawn tight to hide lamplight. Everyone’s voices are muffled but still merry. Faintly, very, very faintly, Eren picks up on Moblit strumming away another warm, sweetly mournful song, inside the cabin.

 _I won’t ask, no, where you came from, no, neither would you. I won’t ask, no, neither should you_.  

The stars are brighter for the glory of the moon, and the wind whines through the trees, and Jean looks Eren right in the eye as he cradles him in one arm and slides his hand down the front of his pants with the other hand.

 _No, I won’t ask, no, where you’re going. Honey, just put your sweet lips on my lips. No, I won’t ask, no, neither could you_.  

Inside, by midnight, they march the Jour des Morts dolls on their sticks around shoulder to shoulder, singing the holiday song before tossing the effigies in the fire under the mantle with the little slips of paper dictating wishes and thoughts for the dead. The dolls burn up and it makes the cabin smell like sage and lavender.

The next evening, a missive arrives from Commander Erwin Smith and it says: _This is a revolution_.

 

 

 

**end iii.**


	4. fear of the water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ **Uprising Arc** ] In which, per usual, Eren has no tact. Two years ago, alone together in the laundry barracks, Jean tried to teach him the linden hop. In which, in a forgotten travel fort deep in the soggy wilderness where a man is tortured in the cellar, firelight dances hot and holy on the faces of the Shiganshina trio. _Heard he killed a man_ , the rumors went. And the song hums: _Do not cry for me, mama, your good son … wait for me a scoundrel and a thief …_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you’re interested in some of the music -- [**dina vierny** | _не жди меня, мама, хорошего сына_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHtuYOhkDCU), **syml** | _fear of the water_ , **bastille/naughty boy** | _no one’s here to sleep_ , **goodbye june** | _darlin’_ , **siv jakobsen** | _toxic_ (cover)
> 
> // [spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/12169251584/playlist/2OZGUINyfg1GaXNij4rlQ7?si=vzwFdW9nTZS_QXrAVERStw)

iv. FEAR OF THE WATER

* * *

 

Eren is thinking. It’s funny, what an arbitrary concept _childhood_ is, and its beginning and its end so very hard to find between scuffles in alleyways and motherly lectures he never thought he’d miss so achingly badly, refugee boats and orphanatoriums, potato farms, military training and military expeditions.

He’s never really felt like a child, anyway. Normal childhoods do not include makeshift spears, knife tied haphazardly to a broomstick, so maybe it should come as no surprise what his life has become. Maybe childhood is what’s unfair, lying about what the world really is. Innocence is cruel — no, ignorance is cruel. Innocence, on the other hand, is an exception.

But perhaps _instinct_ is the true blessing here.

Historia lifts her head and draws a sharp breath, sitting up a little at the table under the window in the hidden room like a cat stirring from a nap straight into a sleepy-eyed stretch. That is, precisely, what it seems she is doing. Eren sits up, too, hard on his elbows, from where he’d been flopped back on the bed eyes fixed unfocused on the lines in the ceiling. Alert, but only in the sense of skirting constantly along the edge of fight or flight.  

“I had the weirdest dream,” Historia says in that dainty but crystal-clear way of hers, eyes cloudy blue but still so bright as she tips her hand gently to and fro, looking at the back of it, her knuckles, as if she has never seen it before. “No, wait,” she mumbles, frowning. “I think it was actually an important dream. But I can’t remember … ”

“Yeah.” Eren sighs, swinging his legs around to sit with elbows propped on his knees. “That happens to me, too. It’s like, when you hear someone shout but all you catch is the echo, and you don’t actually know what the words were.”

Historia stares at him, mouth pressed in a firm line. “That’s a good way to put it.”

It’s already so late in the day. Almost sunset. Worries distract him in a numb, inarticulate way. Just a creeping sense of unease and vexation for the powerlessness in this situation. The Reeves Company … humans. They are up against humans. He wishes they were just fighting titans. He cannot remember anything but being fearless and young and he is restless with it.

“I’m sorry I failed,” Eren says.

Historia squints at him from the table as he moves over to sit across from her, looking very pale and faint against the sunlight and all the dust dancing in its wash. There is something about her that has become rather grave since Utgard. From porcelain to bleached bone. Just a plain and pretty girl. When she was Christa, she was like a child, wide blue eyes and blonde hair falling over one shoulder. But as Historia, she feels more like a woman. Attentive blue eyes and blonde hair in a three-strand braid, tickling the nape of her neck.

“Why are you apologizing to me?” she asked.

Eren shrugs, arms crossed. “Ymir.”

Historia tucks a lock of blonde hair behind her ear, frowning faintly. “I envy you, you know, Eren,” she murmurs after a moment. Eren’s face pinches; he gives her a quizzical look. She issues a shrug in turn. “No matter how hard it gets, you know what you want. You go after what you want. But I … don’t know what I want anymore. I just have roles to fill — ”

“I get it.”

“I don’t think you do.” Her eyes flicker over him almost begrudgingly, almost crossly.

“No.” Eren gives her an indignant look, surprised by her audacity. “I _do_ understand.”

Historia peers at him a moment as if she doesn’t believe him. When the impassive yet somehow still pensive smile wilts her face, brow knotting, he’s not sure if she ended up believing him or just deciding she was right and he was wrong. “Do you miss the old me?”

Eren’s face pinches, a little cock of the brow. “No,” he mumbles. “I really didn’t like the old you. It just felt like you were trying really hard to be someone you’re not and make people like you. Kind of creepy, in a way. I like you now. You’re just a normal fucking girl who’s not afraid to be herself anymore.”

Historia looks at him, mildly offended.

“God, you’re tactless,” she murmurs, more to herself than to him, and although her blue eyes shimmer in the sunlight like they’re made of tears, she starts to laugh.

***

 _southern 104 th division training grounds, one year and a half ago_.

Eren does not well manage embarrassment. Every small fumble is excruciating ignominy to him, every relatively inconsequential defeat a deep devastation and agonizing failure. 

Today is the third anniversary of the fall of Wall Maria, so the ice is even thinner under psychological foot.

Of this, Jean is not fully aware, or he has not yet linked causation and/or correlation to Eren’s snark and flintlock temper snaps. And people like Eren, not that Jean has ever met nor does he expect to meet anyone else like Eren, and that’s glorious — people like Eren driven by an ore of ire and valorous vigor certainly possess even less acuity of self.

So, naturally, when a guy named Nole makes fun of him after he falls during aerial ropeslide course, he lost his shit. A taut line of stainless steel cable and a shuttle, platform to platform in the trees, other cadets down below operating wooden “Titans” with levers and winding, rising them up and lowering them down. A test of core strength and arm strength, of agility and speed of reaction and flexibility. Eren’s grip on the shuttle had slipped and he’d grappled but ultimately dropped (he was not the only one; there were at least five that dropped to the padding below). The shuttle, rattling and chattering down to the opposite platform, shouts from others of concern and of support as he tumbled the short enough but still intimidating fall to the crash padding.

Nole heckled and guffawed, “Well, if _Eren J_ _ä_ _ger_ can’t do it, there’s no hope for humanity, is there?” 

Eren snapped like the twigs underfoot as he strutted over, cocked a fist back, and clocked the guy across the face with a satisfying click of the guy’s teeth and wet lip sound from impact. 

Nole punched him back, of course, and then they both seemed satisfied, so they both stormed away holding split lip, throbbing cheek. 

Luckily, the supervising instructor was one who did not really give a fuck and thought physical altercations were learning opportunities, so he just gave Eren a week of solitary laundry duty.

He looks exhausted already, knuckles red and raw from scrubbing sheets and linen in quickly cooling water with displeased fists, simmering in a weakening brooding session. Jean knows a week of laundry duty is grueling. A faint bloom of purple and pink on the apple of Eren’s cheek where Nole hooked him in recompense. 

Jean leans back against the long wooden supply table that runs along one wall, where amongst jars of soap and clothespins, the lamplight swells and Eren’s got the dial on the tiny radio cocked towards a southern station. He doesn’t, normally; he’s pretty keen on catching nearby districts’ military broadcasts. Tonight, apparently, he’s not in that sort of mood. And Jean waits, an impatiently patient visitor, wagging one foot crossed over the other, for Eren to vocalize his grievances as he always does, indignant and wounded by what he deems injustices.

But Eren just scrubs the laundry on the washboard, scowling, having acknowledged Jean’s arrival with a moody little glance and scowl softened to moue. Quiet still, he scrubs too hard and scrapes his hand, again, on the washboard with a hiss of, “Ow, motherfucker … ”

Jean pushes away from the table with a short sigh, crossing the meager distance between them and pulling the washboard from Eren’s wet hands with a bump and a swish of the soapy water. Eren doesn’t resist but he looks up at Jean darkly, lips parted and waiting for fodder to fire.

The music coming in and out of broadcast fuzz and whine is a good dancing song. Energetic and catchy, winding and trilling, string and percussion. _Ah, under the green pine, lay me down to sleep!_ the lyrics go.

Jean pulls a dirty sheet from the Dorm No. 3 crate and shoves it at Eren to dry his hands. “I’m teaching you to dance.”

Eren rears back, crumpling down into himself in defensive shock. “Are you saying I don’t know how to dance?”

“No, I mean … ”

“Your Trost is showing.” 

Sighing through his teeth in exasperation, Jean grabs Eren by the elbow and hoists him up off the little bench he’s slumped on. His cadet jacket is flopped on the table; he’s taken off his belts and left them on his bed before coming down to the laundry barrack. Jean saw when he checked to see if he was there in the bunks. Without them, it’s easier to see the way his body moves under cream-white henley shirt, white pants smudged at the knees, streaks of drying grey where he’s been wiping his wet hands on his thighs intermittently. He staggers a step or two but he is limp in Jean’s gentle grip, still glaring at him, doubtful and waiting for more perceived condescension.

Blushing, maybe, in that flustered and frustrated way he always blushes, like he disdains the fluttery feelings he cannot control and cannot predict.

Jean smirks, spinning inside for the glory every time he throws off guard the young man who throws him so off guard all the damn time.

“You know the linden hop?” Jean asks, preemptively unbuttoning at the wrists and folding up his sleeves.

Eren stands with arms crossed, nose wrinkled, a pre-lip curl. “A little.”

“I’m gonna teach you,” Jean announces.

Flicker of dark eyelashes, stunned and suspicious amber eyes. “Why … ?”

“Because you need to cheer the fuck up, man, and it’s impossible to dance the linden in a bad mood.”

“You just wanna show off.”

“No, but it’s not my fault if you like watching me dance.”

Eren is definitely blushing. Rosy pink and light red and purpling blue in the shape of Nole’s knuckles.

Jean shrugs, reaching over to turn up the volume and twist the dial until he finds a fuzzy jazzy station on the old radio, dust bunnies stuck in its edges. “Just consider it a favor you don’t have to return. Now you’ll have more than the Czarl’ston on rec nights.”

“I can mountain tango, too, you piece of burnt toast.”

“Oh, that’s a good insult. Creative.”

Eren opens his mouth to retort, but Jean unknots his arms from his chest for him, the key around his throat catches the low lamplight as Jean laces their fingers, arms held outstretched between them.

“Okay,” he says, having the kind of day where it is so difficult not to indulge in Eren’s rotten moods. There is a difference, after all, between his sulking and real emotional extremism. “So, take it slow, follow me, this is the basic footwork … ”

Laundry sits sodden and forgotten in the wooden wash basin — dry and abandoned in the dormitory crates.

“Here, like this … ”

“Yeah, I know a little of that.”

“Okay, so speed up a little — ”

Jean guides the gentle shuffle and tap of feet and cross behinds and cross befores, the reach back with one arm while clutching Eren’s hand in the middle like a game of tug of war.

The song jaunts on: _Little red berry, red berry of mine — oh, swing-sway, oh, swing-sway!_

“You turn in a circle, right?”

“Yeah, you ready for that?”

“Fuck you,” Eren grumbles, and Jean can see the heat in his concentrated eyes like this is some sort of contest in which he rallies against disadvantage. But they circle slow, footwork and reaches.

“Add hops when you feel like it.”

“I _know_ , I’ve seen people do it — ”

He stumbles a few times; Jean loses some footwork trying to match Eren’s pace. But Eren urges him to go faster, his fingers tight and hard on Jean’s. They speed up as the next song starts, turning, stepping, crossovers, heel and toe, knees popping higher with confidence — Eren’s eyes are bright and focused, a little smile perking at his mouth, his face is getting flushed from the activity, chest rolling under his shirt as it starts to come untucked at the sides — he loses grip on Jean’s hand and stumbles back a few steps —

“This is dumb!” he growls, bristled like an alley cat. He’s deeply frustrated now, forgets to be mad at Jean and is just mad at himself for giving up. 

Jean is reconsidering the idea that this was a good way to cheer him up.   
“It’s stupid — it’s a stupid city dance and I don’t care if I know it or not — you just always think you’re better than everyone else — ”

Jean grabs Eren by the arm again and pulls him in for a surprise kiss to shut him the fuck up. His body is fever hot from the dancing, heaving as he catches his breath. Kissing him to shut him up usually works. It does not tonight. Eren just kisses him back for a breath or two like he’d rather be biting him, before turning his face side to side and wrestling out of Jean’s grip. He is pouting and irate, and Jean thinks it’s petty, but petty is hardly ever petty to Eren.

“I just thought it might cheer you up,” Jean mumbles.

Eren spits back, “You just wanted to hold my hand, probably.”

“Oh no,” Jean scoffs, rolling his eyes. Eren is so God damn childish sometimes. Like holding hands is some abomination, like they’re back to the times when they weren’t kissing regularly, meeting secretly to touch each other in other places. “Sorry, I didn’t realize holding hands was too much … look, Eren, it was supposed to be fun.”

“Well, it’s _not_. It’s annoying me.”

“ _Everything_ is annoying you today.”

“Yeah. So I want to be alone. Can I get back to the laundry now?”

Jean stomps over to the radio and turns it back to the southern station, where a soldier boy song is lilting mournful and slow, high notes plucked on a folk guitar and warbling voice.

 _Do not cry for me, mama, your good son_ … _wait for me a scoundrel and a thief_ …

Jean does not know why Eren is so temperamental tonight, outraged by what was supposed to be playful and silly. It’s off-putting. Maybe it’s just his kickback from potential failure, even as small as messing up a dance he is only learning. Maybe it injures his classical pride to be taught something by Jean of all people, embarrassed to be seen struggling with something. Maybe he’s just overtired and worn out from the last few days of laundry late into the night and early morning roll calls for strenuous training drills. He is impossible; it’s like those times when they fight after sex, those times he takes everything wrong, unconscious sabotage in the event he actually be given something good and not have it taken away from him. He accuses Jean all the time of pushing him away before he can be taken away, but maybe he doesn’t realize he does the same thing —

“It’s just a bad day to piss me off,” Eren concedes in a tiny voice.

“I didn’t mean to piss you off,” Jean replies curtly, eyes narrowed at Eren from where he slouches at the table with the soaps and the clothespins. Eren does not look back at him; he just sits down at the wash basin again and starts to wring out the sheet he’d left in the water, his face set in a dark frown just soft enough not to be a scowl.

“It’s a bad day,” Eren says again, and Jean realizes he is not angry now but grim, glum. He does not wait for Jean to ask. He says, “It’s, you know, _the_ day.”

Jean wilts into a frown, into a shoulder-droop. _The_ day. Of course. That makes sense. The day Shiganshina fell, three years ago. The day his world ended. Or the day his world began.

Jean does not say anything, because he does not feel he has the right to.

So he just watches Eren for a bit, and Eren doesn’t seem to mind like Jean doesn’t mind the silence, just breathing the air consecrated by Eren’s presence. The tousle of his hair and the way his throat slopes into the unbuttoned collar of his shirt, ridge of his collarbone and shift of his taut shoulders and the supple flex of muscles in his forearms. Gentle rise and fall of his chest and roll of his middle as he leans forward and his breathing settles down, shirt loose from his belt and draped over the buckle. Fucking Eren, so sweet and lustrous even when sullen and spiteful, his sun-kissed ears and heart face, his wide and wild eyes and the way it still drives Jean a little mad for how inexplicably much he draws him to him even as he plucks at all his wrong nerves, on purpose here, unaware there …

He just wants to protect those radiant smiles and inviolable glances. That’s all.

***

_present._

The roads of mountain switchbacks are perils made of mud and floods. The MP Interior Brigade officer Sannes learns this firsthand. The Survey Corps means business. This Sannes also learns firsthand, in the cold, dank cellar of a small, forgotten travel fort deep in the soggy wilderness.

“We’re not good people anymore.”

“I signed up to fight the titans, not people … ”

“We’re planning a coup. That’s probably not all we’ll have to do.”

“We’ll hang at the gallows — ”

“Not if we don’t fail.”

“We’re fucking torturing somebody down there!”

“And?”

“People are hurting people now, Eren!”

“Sometimes people have to hurt people — ”

“Well, not everyone has practice like you do,” Jean parries, quite satisfyingly holier than thou, and he immediately regrets it.

There is a collective inhale, rustling through the handful of them at the table, a pause like a tumbleweed, like wind blowing through the battlefield. Like whispers, around tables in the mess hall of military training barracks. In clusters, in corners of dormitories.

 _Heard he killed a man_ … 

Something tightens between the Shiganshina trio — Armin. Mikasa. Eren, the madman, violence and virtue, the new breed of mercenary. Truculence and trauma and sheer force of will.

So it’s true, then.

“Ah, there’s the good old Trost high horse,” Eren disparages, so unapologetically and unsympathetically uncouth as his eyes seem to share the fire of the lamplight. “We don’t have time for your selfish, defeatist bullshit, Jean. You heard the Captain. It’s run or fight.”

Eren has always been mildly cavalier in his narrow focus and cocky determination. But this is not that. This is something altogether darker and more demanding. The words were plucked to crucify and crucify they do, pierce deep in Jean’s chest as he rears back, giving Eren a look of bitter insult and injury.

He does not want to incur his wrath, his tears, the lovely twist of pain and pride that is his sadness. But Jean is not obliged to bend to his selfishness, either.

“Fuck you, Eren,” he edges out through his teeth, voice threadbare and cold. “You’re more of a fucking maniac than we ever thought if you’re not scared.”

Eren does not say he isn’t scared. He does not say he is. Maybe he feels the sting of betrayal not for the recovery of trauma but for the crisis of faith and comradery. He just glares at Jean through the glow of the lamp, his eyes catch the light of it and burn like a wildfire. A wildfire blazing in the wilderness of his soul. And it is impossible to gauge whether it is a controlled burn, or a natural disaster, just like Jean does not know whether his own hostility is a defensive feint of heart or fossilized, furious fear.

It is so off-putting sometimes.

 _Run, or fight_.

But when did fighting become running, and running become fighting?

 _We’re not good people anymore_ …

The thunder and lightning has moved past the lodgings, but the wind still moans against the vine-covered stone and modest parapet, the rain still pounds at the windows like so many little fists. The glass rattles now and again for the wailing gusts.

Jean does not remember how long ago it was that he found out thunderstorms make Eren nervous. It’s barely been months since disbanding, and if even that feels like eternities ago, training feels like a past life — but it was back in training one night, a mountain summer and lightning storm. And Eren, sneaking into bed with Armin instead of Jean — Eren lying there in the dark with Armin between him and the wall, and Armin’s arm draped comfortingly around his waist as Armin drifted off into the lulling sound of thunder and gales again, and Eren lying rigid staring across the dark room at Jean with eyes hard and bright, mouth twisted in a firm line. Staring at him because Jean stared back, half-covered in blanket and musing on if Eren is afraid because lightning triggers bad memories he will not speak.  

Upstairs in the dark now, it is just the two of them lying in a mess of blankets on the pallet bed as far away as possible from the stairs that open so closely onto the room down below, where others sit pretending they can’t also hear the screams from the cellar even through the mournful groans of the storm — Eren, curled into Jean’s edges, putting Jean’s arm to sleep below his head as he noses and nudges into his shoulder, the slope of his neck. Hiding from the storm.

It’s good to Jean to know he’s still good for something, then. Eren, soft sweet skin and mess of dark hair, darker lashes tickling Jean’s cheek like his breath tickles his throat as it eventually evens out. His body is fever hot, he is always like a furnace, and so supple and soft even for the lithe, cut way in which his muscles forge with his bones below the wrinkles of his shirt. 

 _When we see the sea_ , Eren had said, back in the cabin outside Trost. When things had been so much simpler. Before everything had changed. Again. Things have changed beyond even their most outrageous conjectures and it leaves Jean reeling, feeling bitter and sick and so, so endlessly tired.

It still haunts him, a little. They have not yet officially confirmed or denied. Wondering if this was all from the beginning a fateful accident or a mistake between them.

But the thing is, that which man fears fascinates him; and that which enrages man completes him.

And Eren frightens him, and Eren enrages him, and Eren is so much faster than him with his sheer velocity of rage and goodness and Jean knows it is impossible to chase the sun, but God damn does he want him so much.

If only they were just fighting, even if it is the same fight they have fought for years — naivete, fickle tempers and kneejerk clashing under the pressure of irresoluble perspectives of the world, desperation to avoid the small death of a farewell, back before the curtains had been drawn and the world outside the window of childhood had turned out so, so very different than they’d longed for. Jean at least knows how to find north in the wood of regular fights, but the wood is up in flames. 

No, they do not fight. Not after the scathing words and kill shots downstairs, around the table, in front of everyone else. Tonight, they just … don’t talk. And the quiet is redolent with personal pains and fatal flaws.

Jean wants to think it unfair of Eren to hold him accountable for his guilt, his consternation. But he knows it is not.

He is at war with the part of himself that admires Eren’s impetuous nerve and inexorable courage, and the part of him that despises him for his unquestioning absolution, for investing in him such high expectations with no room for upholding self-indulgent self-doubt. Perhaps he is a masochist. This is the contract he’s signed, after all. Predictable unpredictability, constant extremes and maddening shifts.

 _Run, or fight_.

Everything in Jean is telling him to run and he knows everything in Eren commands his fight.

Eren’s breath syncopates with his, slow and steady, like his lungs are not full of matches, every word at risk to spark flames. He followed Jean upstairs and Jean braced for another row — but Eren just followed him to thud down on the makeshift bed beside him and shove himself through Jean’s defenses and tuck up into and onto him, arm wrapped around his side.

“I don’t forgive you yet,” Jean had said, voice still thick with simmering fury in the back of his throat.

“I don’t know what you’re supposed to forgive me for,” Eren had said back.

“You’re selfish,” Jean muttered.

“Maybe.”

“You really don’t understand, do you? What it’s like to be afraid?”

Eren had stared at Jean darkly for a moment. It is difficult to tell rage from love with him, two sides of the same emotion. The woeful embers in those amber eyes are sacrosanct to Jean. Begging in that deranged, furiously feeling way of his that always feels a bit more like demanding. All or none. Everything or nothing.

“You don’t have to forgive me,” he said, and not that long ago, Eren would have argued; he would not have so somberly replied, betraying he does understand what he has done wrong.

“Just don’t run from me, either,” he said after.

That was it.   

And in those twelve words was an instant erosion not of innocence but of denial: denial of the dangers of the world, denial of inevitable sins, denial of dependency on one another, denial of denial itself.

Eren’s wild soul is primal and inviolable. His is an intense, unwaning love, external; Jean’s love, internal. Ruthless on himself while Eren’s is ruthless on the object of his affection. And Jean is drawn to its dark magic like a moth to flame, this holy temple of verve. Born without a mask over the rough raw brilliance of the ore of his humanity, this sprite of inspiration possessed by some ancient spirit of violence and valor. Jean is afraid to touch it should it burn him too badly — should he smother it any more than he has at times, and through every fault of his own.  

God damn, he does not know what it is Eren does to him, epiphany or epitaph, but it works. He hates it because he doesn’t hate it at all.

Again Jean thinks that if anyone will make it through the end of the world, it will be Eren. But Jean will damn well try, too.

 

 

 

**end ch. iv.**


	5. Take Me to Church

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ **Uprising Arc** part ii and **Orvud District** ] In which people killing people is pretty new, and they are fugitives now. Glory days come fast and dip faster. There is something exosomatic about loving Eren. “Yeah,” Armin says, propping a foot up on a barrel to tighten a rope, hands raw and scraped-up but strong, firm. “Lucky for them, there are soldiers up here today who can actually fight back. And those soldiers are _us_.” Jean does not cry. That is Eren’s job. And Jean has gone through more in the last day than Eren feels he has the right to ask about yet. “You love me,” Eren decrees, laughing. “And you know it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **tw/cw:** blood, guns  
>  **a/n:** i’m so so so sorry for the delay, guys – just the super inactivity all around. but here we are! // so many songs for this one, omg. please listennn **hozier** | _take me to church_ , **jennifer lawrence** | _the hanging tree_ , **seafret** | _be there_ , **syml** | _where’s my love_ (acoustic), **the decemberists** | _shankhill butchers_ , & **vancouver sleep clinic** | _whispers_ , **flyleaf** | _again_ (acoustic)
> 
> // [spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/12169251584/playlist/2OZGUINyfg1GaXNij4rlQ7?si=vzwFdW9nTZS_QXrAVERStw)

v. TAKE ME TO CHURCH

* * *

 

They lie when they say one’s life flashes before their eyes before they die, because as Jean stares down the barrel of a gun, he is not graced by a lustrous, humming play of memories. He just has Eren’s face stuck in his head like a song, hears Eren saying, _How fucking dare you die on me, you motherfucker?_

The wagon rattles and jumps through the district streets. People shout and scatter as the violence blows through alleyways, thoroughfares, around corners and courtyards, as Military Police special officers close in on wanted men — 

_CRACK!_

The wagon hits a patch of broken cobbles and Jean’s hat flies away.

Blood cools the second it hits his cheek, paints a streak across his mouth, patters across his collar and shoulders like the first spurts of rain on a cloudy day. His ears ring and the smell of gunpowder fills his head, they ride so fast through the streets that they leave a fog of smoke hanging suspended in their shadow.  

The MP who had her firearm pointed at Jean’s forehead hits the floor of the wagon bed, rolls, flies out onto the street they leave behind, and if Jean were not already familiar with what someone with half a head looks like, he would probably be traumatized anew. He _is_ traumatized anew, actually.

People killing people is pretty fucking new to him.    

Behind him at the reins, Armin shoves his gun back into his belt so he can steer with two hands again. He shot the woman. It was him. And there is a fierceness to his face, the savage simplicity of survival, in which he must have learned from Eren to take pride as he looks at Jean over his shoulder and cries, “You okay? We’re almost out of town!”

Jean gawks at him, the stream of air they cut through as they speed out of the district rushing and clawing at his collar, through his hair. He thinks he nods. Maybe he’s just jerked around by the jolting of the cart.

The plan was pretty good, but the plan went south rather fast.

By nightfall they find shelter, dilapidated as it may be. They are fugitives now. Just the handful of them, and Captain Levi getting stitches by firelight, Sasha’s mouth pursed side to side in the knot of her concentration over the needle and thread.

“I don’t know what right or wrong is,” the Captain says to Jean, his voice like burnt silk. Smooth but textured by unspoken experiences and enigmatic past. “You hesitated to shoot, but were you really in the wrong?”

There is a cool calm to his assessment of morals and murder that is not weakness, but resolve, perhaps a bit of natural detachment, and — ah. This is where Eren gets it. No, maybe they are just cut from the same sod.   

Jean does not have the answer to that. None of them do. Not Sasha, firelight dancing on her intent face. Not Conny, pulling a knit cap down low over his bare head and barer ears. Not Mikasa sitting with her shoulder pressed up to Armin’s shoulder, not Armin with his blue eyes empty but his mind’s eye clearly playing the scene in the streets of Stohess over and over, and over again …

Part of Jean hates Captain Levi for pushing them all to their breaking points. For being the knight in shining armor of Eren’s childhood dreams. And he hates him because he looks at Jean when he thinks Jean doesn’t know, looks at him like he knows Eren is everything to him. Like it’s familiar. Like he knows what it looks like and knows what it feels like.  

Not only does Jean not have the heart, but he does not have the spine to tell Armin he could not shoot because without Eren, he … gave up.  

Youth feels so very far away.

Who knew their glory days would come so fast, and leave so soon?

Wildgrass up to the shoulders waves and shimmies in the night wind, running along the perimeter of the MP Interior Brigade compound, its imposing brick and neatly layered stone, modest peaks. There is a fountain in the central courtyard, surrounded by a plain but sturdy arcade. The water in it runs a bit darker with blood as Mikasa and the Captain lead the advance, distract for the others.

 _Before the walls were built, Nemo and Hylios_ , Eren had said, face full of mountain spring sunlight _. The lovers that fought the titans_.

Sasha and Jean get to the roof together, soles of their boots scraping on shingles like great grey snake scales.

In the middle of a battle, the mind separates the world into pieces for better processing, as if gleaning what it knows the psyche will not be able to handle until much, much later, post-trauma and fissure of delayed shock.

 _They died together victorious killing the last titan on the field_.

Later, Jean will marvel on how he does not feel the scabbing goose egg on his temple, where Hitch nailed him with the branch in the forest. Does not recall hearing anybody screaming, just the satisfying, creaking stretch of Sasha’s bow, the snap of it from her fingers and the evenness of her breath even as she breathes hard. He _does_ recall the whistling and smooth rush of Mikasa and Captain Levi and Conny, weaving through the air like a flock of playful birds, familiar pop of maneuvering gear pistons, shriek and grind of military metal as they latch onto surface. Glint of moonlight off ultra hard steel.

He lost his purpose quietly in the night. It comes back just as quietly, and fortified.

If Eren is Hylios, and Jean, Nemo, then he will gladly don his armor and fight for him. Gods know he has done this literally before. Twice. This time, the decision is a bit more romantic and meaningful than that — a paradigm shift, not a disguise.

The whole world goes quiet as Jean lifts the shotgun to his shoulder and squeezes one eye for better focus. He hears nothing but his own heart in his ears; he feels nothing but the wind in his hair, in the cloak around his shoulders; he breathes in, the crisp deep autumn air, rich with the fragrance of gas and wildgrass; he tastes blissful adrenaline on his teeth. Invigorating, to feel so cold yet alive at the same time. He did, back in training, receive very high scores for sharp shooting.

Eren is going to see the sea.

Mikasa and Armin will see the sea with him.

Jean is going to see the sea.

They are all going to see it.  

For the first time, he wants to control his own narrative. Not his mother, not the military, not Eren. He is betwixt and between who he was and who he is becoming. But as he squeezes the trigger and the kickback kickstarts a rush in the veins —

Jean becomes.

He is going to see the sea. He aims and fires again. He’s going to see it. The sea. Human against human has a very different sort of gore to it. Gentle reminder that human bodies are both resilient and terrifyingly vulnerable.   

He shoots one of the MPs through the throat and the blood is like ribbons as the man falls, and Jean with the taste of nerves and gunpowder on his tongue, he thinks: he is going to see Eren again, and he is going to see the sea.

“The false charges against us have been dropped — administration is currently under Zackley’s control — the nobles haven’t counterattacked — _we’re free now_!”

Mikasa hurries a step or two to walk side by side with Jean as they follow Hanji and the others back to the small caravan, directions to the Reiss estate committed to immediate memory. Without looking at him, she says, “You love him, right?”

Just like he asked her not even a fortnight ago, back at the cabin. A bone-weary smirk tugs at Jean’s mouth. Now that the fight is wearing off, he can feel very well again the place where Hitch assaulted him with that branch in the forest. He does not say anything. He doesn’t have to.

“Don’t you dare fail him,” Mikasa ordains. Her voice is so cool and firm, but when her dark eyes find his through the dance of her loose hair, they are trusting.

Jean clears his throat, adjusts the strap of his shotgun across his chest. “We won’t,” he husks, raises his brows and offers her a nod of promise. “We’ll get him back.”

Under the church, everything is white and full of smoke — exhaust, biting perfume of gunpowder, raining dust from crystalline walls punctured by maneuver gear.

The sound of gunshots is louder down here, where it has so many sharp edges off which to resound. Voices reverberate, shiver shrill and crystalline like fairies singing in the night off jagged, pellucid walls and columns.

“We’re leaving, Eren!”

The chamber seems to glow pearlescent yet grey at the same time.

“ _You need to just eat me!_ ”

“You _fucking_ crybaby!”

Shrieks, and choking sobs, and the clatter of chain. High treble of Historia, sharpened like a blade; the raw, threadbare velvet of Eren’s loud fucking mouth.

“There’s nothing special about me! I can’t live like this anymore!”

“I’m getting you out of here, and then I’m going to destroy _everything_ — ”

There is a blinding flash. A bone-rattling explosion, a clap of thunder. A gust of scorching, putrid-smelling wind. And a loud, heart-sinking cracking sound like the earth breaking open. The thick gale, suffocating like high and higher humidity, swirls in the right direction to speed maneuvering from stalactite to stalactite, leaving a spray of dust and crumbling white pebbles from the bite of grappling hooks, and Mikasa catches Historia when she finally loses traction in the windstorm of her father’s treachery.

Hanji — where are Squad Leader Hanji and the others?

“ _Give me the keys!_ ” the Captain howls. So there _is_ a man who feels and wants in there, beyond his stoic eyes and tight, taciturn mouth.

“Watch the rocks!” Jean cries, clutching Eren’s arm in a lock partly to keep his own balance, clinging to one of the trembling iron chains that pulls Eren taut like crucifixion. And good, he deserves punishment for his melodramatics — doesn’t want to live anymore? _Really_?

“Hurry, Springer!” the Captain roars.

“I can’t find the right key — ” Conny gasps.

Eren looks between them all like he fears he is dreaming there on his knees, on the precipice of surrender and devoid of hope, eyes wide and full of dumb wonder. Bare skin and heaving chest, straining muscles, dark hair blown back out of his God damn beautiful face. Jean has never seen him not believe in himself, but he will not let everything they have done in the last twenty-four hours go to waste because Eren is having a crisis of self.

“Snap out of it, Eren!” Jean cries. “We’ve got fuckers with _guns_ on our ass, too — you hear me, shirtless wonder?”

The strange Reiss Titan is still unfurling, slowly, throbbing, struggling to emerge from the cavern like a butterfly from the chrysalis. The roof is crumbling. The team barely escapes a massive, shuddering boulder, snap of shackles and crack of the crystallized carbon platform which they have just evacuated.

“Today just keeps getting shittier and shittier,” the Captain remarks, and Jean is beginning to understand his dark, irreverent humor. It makes things a hell of a lot easier.

Eren needs to transform. He _needs_ to _shift._ He looks like an ancient god, ritual blood smeared across his face like war paint — gasping like he can’t find the air to breathe through it and tears and spit and the sand of debris sprayed on the wind as the chamber slowly, slowly, begins to buckle into itself. The world rumbles; the world groans. The ceiling is caving in.

“I’m sorry — ” Eren grits out, thrown back against the scaly, glimmering wall. His fit is fervent, fresh tears fat and running tracks through rusty blood, reopening the slash line across his forehead. Wherever the fuck that came from. “I’m fucking useless! I have been from the very beginning!”

“What, now you wanna play the tragic hero?” Jean growls.

“Quit sobbing!” Conny’s voice is quaking as much as the earth. “This isn’t the first time things have been this bad, we’ll make it out — ”

“Not saying I’d like to get used to it!” is Sasha’s frantic addendum. 

The world is a sarcophagus of falling stone and thickening hazy heat. It’s making it harder to breathe.

Something savage and determined has awoken in Historia; it’s kind of alluring the same it’s shocking. She scowls at Eren, hair whipping about her face like her white gown whips about her slim legs and she seethes, “What do you want to do, Eren, just sit here and hold hands until we’re crushed or burned to death? Because we’re enemies of humanity? Because you think you’re so worthless? Are we all worthless, then — ?”

The Captain clutches Eren’s arm, to drag him closer. If Jean were that close, he’d be able to steal a kiss. But the Captain just looks Eren in the eye, his face grim, a flicker of fallibility. Things are bad if the Captain’s shell of strength is cracking. He doesn’t shout, doesn’t scream, just speaks calmly above the deafening storm of rocks and wind and Titan clawing like an oversized arachnid into the glimpses of the night sky through falling roof.

“Eren,” he says. And Eren gawks at him, eyes wide and wild. “I hate to do this to you again,” the Captain urges. “But I need you to make a choice — ”

Eren snatches a little brown vial with a yellowing label. He runs, and he jumps, body unwinding into spine and muscle fiber and open, roaring mouth, and a grin breaks across Jean’s face.

He is enraptured by the beauty of it all. Chilled deep and ecstatic. There is something exosomatic about loving Eren. Eren is a god. He is Jean’s god. And Jean will gladly worship at the altar of his primal magic, his unhinged gospel. He is a willing priest, a loving keeper. Just like Nemo to Hylios in that stupid fucking story Eren loves so much —

“Go! Go!” Mikasa urges, pushing at Jean. Ah, right. They are on their way out.  

The night air is a welcoming embrace, spinning around them as they pry themselves out of the earth like the dead rising in folklore — up, out, into the swallow of a zenith full of stars and wild wind ripping through the grass. And the world has never seemed to Jean so big, so open. So beautiful. 

***

_Do you remember your father’s sin?_

A small stone church, quaint and piously plain — narrow pews — mullioned windows — the cavern below, the shocked faces, horrified faces, family in white raiment — _What are you doing here? Who are you?_ — the flash and roar of a Titan underground, echoing to the bones in the chamber of holy stalactites, the belly of the earth — she is bones and skin and shimmering blonde hair, sunken cheeks and eyes like the eyes of too many souls — the sound a spine makes when it is slipped from the skin like deboning a fish — thick, silvery taste of spinal fluid —

All of them, died because of him. No, his _father_. All of them: Armin’s grandpa. Thomas. Mina. Mylius. Nac. Marco. The first Squad Levi. Stohess District. Hannes.

None of it mattered. None of it needed to happen.

_Do you remember your own sin?_

Moonlight glinting off a long, sterilized needle. The hot, frantic grip of his father’s hand. The bite of the needle in his arm. The sickening rush in his veins. The whole world, spinning, waxing and waning, and his father, his father sobbing and smiling at the same time — his father’s glasses, crunched under the foot of something grotesque and ravenous — his father’s blood congealing on fallen leaves and crushed twigs — his father’s legs at the wrong angles, half his father’s arm lying there in a nest of bloody grass, a limp, pallid, dead thing.

 _You have to learn how to control this power_ …

Eren stands at the edge of Wall Rose, body bristled and chest heaving, waiting to vomit.

Atop the Wall, no one is eating, although the Garrison has hurried to their aid with water and field rations. It is a very disorienting thing, to have time to sit and recuperate, casually swinging one’s legs over the side of the Wall while the great, steaming monstrosity Rod Reiss has become makes its torturously slow way towards Orvud District. It’s an eyesore on the horizon, smoking like a forest fire.

With a trembling thumb, Eren swipes sour-tasting spit from his chin, wipes it off on his pants as he makes his way over to the others at the cannon rails. His cheeks and jaws are sore from the press of the leather and metal bit Rod Reiss crammed in his mouth, his wrists bruised from the shackles. They’ll heal sooner than not. Titan blood, and whatnot.

“Hey,” he says, sagging down to sit beside Armin with his legs dangling over the side of the Wall. He leans and elbows Jean in the back of the leg. “You should eat.”

He does not want to eat, personally, himself; his stomach churns with every bite of protein bar, but he knows he needs to. The sun has dragged itself over the horizon and Rod Reiss’s ugly lumpy mountain of a body is close enough they can smell it on the wind.

“Yeah,” Jean husks. “No thanks. We’ve been killing people left and right. I’m not exactly hungry.” 

The food turns to paste, coating Eren’s tongue thick as his mouth goes dry. His stomach bottoms out and he gawks at Jean a moment, wishing he could swallow.

“What … ?” he breathes.

“A lot has happened, Eren.” Jean’s hazel eyes flicker to meet his over his shoulder, heated and fragile. Fragile not like a flower, but fragile like gunpowder. “And the day’s not over.”

He stands with his back to Eren. So does Mikasa, lingering close to Sasha’s side. Conny sits cross-legged on a crate near the rails, arms crossed and eyes downcast. The lot of them, strapped up and sporting maneuver gear. Ready. Gathering themselves. Watching Rod Reiss’ detestable giant slug body inch its way forth as casually as watching a boat pass on one of the rivers.

Eren looks down, past his dangling feet at the ground, meters and meters away. Daybreak rippling pale and soft through the grass below. He is not generally afraid of heights — that was a defect to be rectified in the first few weeks of military training, after all — but his heart falls through his chest and he is dizzied by the steep drop, suddenly. Clutches the edge of the wall with his free hand and just gawks at the death that waits below. It is so far. It is so beautiful and so damning and they are all so, so small.

 _Killing people left and right_ … He is not so daft that he believes they can all feel the same as he did that day in the mountain cabin with Mikasa and a knife tied to a broomstick. He understands there is something wrong with him for glorying in that. Never mind the small death that comes to a man when he is forced into such a situation. All the sacrifices made by soldiers commanded to defend him with their lives is enough — yet to be a participant in the small deaths of something in those he loves is a sin for which there is no redemption to him.

It is crisper here, on the North side of Wall Rose. Eren has not been this far North before.

The shelling begins.

Not being Garrison, Eren still jumps at every other periodic blast from the cannons. The orders are called levelly, without panic. Now and again morale is, indeed, high and unified, after all.

They will tie and loop a two-by-eight battlement of gunpowder barrels, knot them to the net in which they will be stuffed. Sleeves of his dark shirt pushed up, thankful for the familiar, very missed feel of his maneuver gear harness pressing on his chest, his shoulders, pattern of belts down his frame, Eren kneels gathering scratchy rope over one forearm to bring to the barrels.

Down below, there are stragglers in the emergency evacuation “drill” — three children.

Watching them. Pointing. So small, so fearfully fearless and horribly curious. Eren almost cannot make them out from up here. But he does.

“Look,” he says to Armin, and through another calm boom of a cannon, Armin looks.

They’re just like them, that day. They have no idea what is on the other side of the Wall. Their parents probably work in the quarries up here and they probably play games in alleyways and hear stories about the Wall breaches but are told they have nothing to fear, and yet here they are, they’re about to see a Titan even bigger than the one _they_ saw on that day …

“Yeah,” Armin says, propping a foot up on a barrel to tighten a rope, hands raw and scraped-up but strong, firm. The muscles in his forearms flex as he gives another tug; the sunlight turns his hair a lovely white blond as the wind pushes through it. “But lucky for them, there are soldiers up here today who can actually fight back. And those soldiers are _us_.”

There are bags under his eyes. His eyes are blue like a bruise. But when he smiles at Eren, Eren is awed — cowed, almost — by the inexplicable and insurmountable courage which fills them deep. It is a lot like when he would point out the images in that book of his, the one that talks about the ocean. Wholly without fear. Without resignation or hesitation. And Eren wonders, is this what Armin used to feel like, looking at _him_? When they were younger, and Eren came skidding round corners to start fistfights in his name, in his honor.

“Stack the barrels three high!” Hanji directs, nursing her arm in a sling. “I changed my mind!”

Eren stares at the rope with dull eyes, winding it slowly. It’s thick; it’s getting heavy the more he coils it. _Boom! Boom!_

“Reload! Reload!”

“One hundred and thirty-five degrees!”

_Boom!_

Eren glimpses Jean approaching from the corner of his eye. Their stacks of barrels must be secured already. He’s always been good with knots. High technicality marks in his Aptitude Scores.   

“Humanity’s pretty unlucky, huh?” Eren croaks with a limp shrug and a brooding smirk as he stands up, back aching, legs cramping. He is ready for the adrenaline to kick in. Any time, now. He just feels so numb and out of it. “To have _me_ as a secret weapon — ”

Jean smacks him. Really smacks him. Like the good old days when they would tangle all locked elbows and grappling hands, pent-up emotional trauma and rusty hormones, lashing out balls deep in the worst of their arguments as young men whose personal tragedies have not been assessed by a shrink with a catalogue of coping mechanisms and stress management. No, it is not a paltry little slap, but not a real fist to face, either. Just Jean’s hand and a half-box to the ear, palm to cheek. Just enough to get Eren’s attention. Just enough to hurt — _pop_!

It sends him staggering back a step or two, shocks and stupefies him more than it offends him. Awakens him from the fever dream of the long, long night. He gawks at Jean a moment, mouth open, free hand halfway to his face. He can feel the shape of Jean’s fingers; the blood pulses under the skin for a moment, cheekbone singing.

“Why are you being so fucking pathetic?” Jean demands. “You never had a problem being the center of attention before!”

“ _What?_ ” Eren chokes out.

“I know we always joked about you being a suicidal maniac, and you looked like a fucking moron — adorable, okay, but still — screaming and punching at nothing trying to get that thing to listen to you on the ride back over here — but I’m so _pissed_ at you for what you said!”

“What did I say?”

“That you want to die!”

_Boom!_

Jean grits his teeth, and Eren realizes that the bright light in his eyes is the urge to cry. Jean does not cry. That is Eren’s job. And Jean has gone through more in the last day than Eren feels he has the right to ask about yet.

“You’ve been living like everyone depends on you for this long,” Jean upbraids, “so why the _fuck_ are you giving up on that all of a sudden?”

 _Killing people left and right_ …

“Because of me, existence is pain for so many people — ” Eren hisses. He feels aflame inside, but not like usual. He feels like he’s burning himself to a crisp with his own fire. “I was trying to do what’s _needed_ — ”

“Oh, shut the fuck up with that woe is me bullshit, Eren.” Jean runs his hands through his hair, an altogether arresting and alluring gesture. His shoulders are so firm under his shirt; his middle tight and narrow like he has not eaten enough in the last day. “Existence isn’t pain,” he sneers. “ _Pain_ is _existence_. And you have so much to exist for.”

“So do you!” Eren snaps.

“Not if you’re gone!” Jean seethes.

 _Boom!_ The cannon shots are slowing; they don’t want to waste ammunition. The monster isn’t close enough to do real damage yet. It is such a slovenly, sluggish thing.  

“I couldn’t shoot at first, you know,” Jean ices out, looking at Eren like he is so tragically doomed by love yet wants to scratch him out of his skin. “I almost died, and so did Armin, all because I second guessed myself. I hesitated. You weren’t there and I gave up. Because that’s _my_ job. Not _yours_. Don’t ever let me hear you say you want to die, ever. Ever again.”

Only they would comfort each other in shouts and conscious, dramatic outbursts. It is their flavor of feeling. The parlance of their partnership.

Eren’s eyes roam Jean a minute, still a bit dazed. Clarity slowly coming back. From Jean’s dashing face, dried blood and smear of soot, dirt cleaned once they’d gotten back to the Wall. There are still scrapes and bruises, though, a nice flowering of black and blue at his temple and the color under his eyes grey with lack of sleep. But Eren can see the leader there in the hazel, bright and clear and searching.

Is this … is this what he looks like, when he’s on his soap box? When he’s rallying everyone else? Completely maddened and emboldened and mercilessly ready?

Eren laughs.

Here they are, and somehow they’ve completely switched. He must be severely fucked up if he responds so positively to violence. “You’re right,” he husks. Because he is. Jean is absolutely right. Eren does not want to die. He never did. He just … gave up.

Jean’s brow knots.

“You’re right, asshole,” Eren repeats himself, giving him a gentle shove. “Don’t make me say it again.”

“Say it again.”

“Go to hell.” His blood is pumping. A rush through his veins, a new potency of passion. A sudden feverish fervor with every thudding heartbeat. He is renewed. Suddenly all the times he’s ever been in trouble have paled; he has never felt truly in danger until last night. And almost dying bequeaths a strange sort of clarity a man can’t understand until he … well, until he almost dies.

Jean perks in a little cat-eyed smirk as if he is so pleased to be the subject of Eren’s sarcasm again.

“So does that mean we’re not stopping?” Eren asks.

Jean’s brow knots, cocks at the same time.

Eren gestures. Intimates. Raises his brows. “Us — ”

“Yeah, no, I know what you mean, Eren.”

_Boom!_

“I can’t stop,” Jean says, with no unnecessary drama of such a confession from a man with a self-professed and carefully maintained aversion to commitment. Just — a statement of fact.

“I don’t want to stop,” Eren agrees.  

  _Boom!_

Eren jumps. Jean jumps. Eren heaves a growl of a sigh, rolling his eyes at the startling sounds. He touches his face, feels the heat of Jean’s blow. It might not bruise, but it sure as fuck hurts.

“You’re lucky I love you,” he mutters in exasperation, hoisting the scratchy rope up to his shoulder, arm muscles protesting against the standstill of weight.  

He hears the breath catch in the back of Jean’s throat; he feels his presence tighten up, some tension between them go taut and quivering. Eren glances over, puzzled. Jean just gawks at him, lips parted, as if this comes as a shock to him. As if he has forgotten how to breathe. Eren raises his brows. The sudden creeping suspicion that Jean has not realized this by now springs a flustered, frustrated heat to his face and he shrugs and waves his free hand, giving Jean a sour look like, _Duh?_ Is it not common sense?

Jean opens his mouth. Closes it. Glance flitting off elsewhere like startled birds taking flight. Eren doesn’t remember the last time he’s seen him this flustered and shy, sheepishly innocent. It’s adorable (and if they were in solitude, he would tell him this, because he knows Jean hates it when he calls him adorable).   

But Eren gets it now. He understands why Jean would want to push him away before he can lose him to something other than himself.

He looks up at Jean, eyes ablaze, and he says, “Tonight when we’re all celebrating victory, I want to get drunk, and then I want to fuck so hard it’ll make you rethink calling me a quitter.”

Jean recoils like he really didn’t expect something like that come from Eren’s mouth. And maybe he didn’t, not at _this_ moment, anyway. Not standing atop the Wall prepping for battle. His eyes dart side to side, as checking to make sure no one has overheard. How the fuck could they? _Boom! Boom!_

“Eren. Fucking. Jäger,” Jean says, with that heat in his hazel eyes and his hair dancing along his forehead, his collar along his throat, and he certainly does look so tragically, defenselessly doomed by devotion. “You’re a God damn maniac.”  

Eren grins, teeth clenched, and he feels the streaks of the last of the renegade tears cooling sticky in the wind this high up off the ground as he gives Jean another loving shove, back to his side of the frontline.  
“You love me, too,” he decrees. “And you know it.”  

***

The battle is won in a series of explosions, smoke from dynamite blurring with the smoke from maneuvering gear and the smoke from a massive body blocking out the sun, un-fused ribcage steaming and gaping like the hungry maw of some great god from the center of the earth, the shrieking from a face sanded down to just holes and bone causing the world to quake with the tremors of sound.

But — the battle is won.

Officials whisk Historia out of sight as soon as physically possible because the residents of Orvud District make it impossible for her to move with their crowding and rejoicing. They need to speak with her. They need to speak with military officials. They need to plan a coronation.

And, after the dust settles in military headquarters, in unprepared hospitals, soldiers do indeed get their well-deserved partying. The district’s city hall bursts at the seams with them. The streets are full of people celebrating. Orvud is alive well into the night with lights and voices.

And children who gawked up at the Walls, the great, august Walls, their protectors, their bastions, sleep in peace as their parents pray thanks and toast special occasion (watered down to coincide with ration) drinks.

As he promised, Eren celebrates. He drinks. Armin drinks. Sasha eats too much and whines about bellyache. Conny can’t stop randomly laughing now and again, leftover adrenaline wreaking havoc on his nerves. Some girls are flirting with him; they heard he was part of the frontline. Mikasa counts Armin and Eren’s drinks. Armin sits with an arm around Eren’s waist and Jean sits with an arm around his shoulders, and nobody thinks it is anything but good cheer and the brilliance of life, because with Historia in some lavish room somewhere, surrounded by guards and administration, Eren is laureate, star of the celebration, by proxy. Which is kind of unfortunate for everyone, because everyone is full of lauding and he is terrible not only at taking praise but at making first impressions.  

The innocence and instinct of not knowing whether one will see another day sometimes has an effect on man very liken that of teenage lust. Mindless, desperate sexual frustration. Exorcism of stress and leftover adrenaline. A deep need to feel and be felt and participate in one of the most basic functional expressions of life —

As promised, they fuck.

In one of the rooms offered to them on the third floor of Orvud’s stationary troops building, like they _feel_ young and unafraid again. Slam of the door and scrape of a chair on the floor when Eren bumps into it, plops down to fumble his boots off, breathless from running through the shadows with Jean. In a spill of moonlight from the tall, multipaned window, Jean throws down his long coat, standard issue, Survey Corps patch on the breast pocket, and yanks his shirt out from his belt, up over his head.

Eren can barely get back to his feet, socked toes curling on the floor, before Jean’s got him in his hands again, drags him forward a stumbling step or two and into a crashing kiss. Tastes like honey beer and tobacco smoke, and that sweetness that is all his own. Dart of tongue — twist of tongue. The small struggle of tangled arms as Eren tries to take his coat off, too. Shuffle of feet —

“Fucking ow,” he gripes against Jean’s mouth, kicking a foot back to rub his toes against his calf. “Take your shoes off, dummy!”

“Sorry, sorry … ”

Pulling apart is torture, even temporary. Jean’s hands run up his back so hard, his fingers take Eren’s shirt with them. It’s an autumn in the north and the cast-iron heater in the corner is cold and dark; the chilly shadows nip at Eren’s bare skin but the friction of Jean’s fingers on his nipple remedies that. Shudders of delight rattle through. His muscles tense, relax, heels dig into the bed as Jean’s knee situates itself between his thighs. He feels so untouched, so sensitive. Everything sparking lust under his skin. Dilated desire. They wrestle a little, the kind of loving rough housing that only turns him on more. Skin a soft pale blue in the moonlight, echo of cheers still in the streets below, music, street musicians, crowds. Jean a shadow looming over him, looming behind him. Pecs to shoulder blades, up on the knees and arching back, leaning back into Jean’s chest, one arm hooked around him and clutching at his hair, at his neck, at his shoulder, anything to keep his balance as hips cramp, as Jean’s hand moves fast and familiar learned on him, body rocking, as Jean fucks him like for all his self-restraint, he just needs a moment to break something, feel in control, like he has some sort of purchase over something, and for all his wielding of ferocious will, Eren just wants to let go and be broken —

Eren has only come twice in one night one time, _that_ way. Tonight is night two. But that’s to be expected, he thinks, when one is at it for a whole dizzying hour and a half. Greedy, flurry of kisses and gasping mouths and desperate, delicious, mindless carnal pleasure as if celebration of being alive, proof of being alive, conquering the sense of being helpless to the world and releasing adrenaline in the most comforting of ways, rapture in the dark putting ragged souls at ease.

And maybe it’s not that something between the two of them was broken; perhaps it’s just that they are both broken, but their jagged edges happen to fit up perfectly with each other.

***

Philanthropy works wonders on a new regime, especially when it’s genuine.

At a small orphan farm somewhere in the rolling countryside between Orvud and Stohess, bosomed in hill and field and wood, Historia looks like a saint in the making — sitting in the dappling shadows of a low-hanging tree, surrounded by disenfranchised children, forgotten children, her blonde hair in a loose little chignon and a rather plain scarf layered about her throat for the crisp day. Down in the mountains of the 104th Southern training grounds, there is undoubtedly feet of snow already. Here, the air smells of it at night, but there is nothing yet. And Historia catches that sunlight in all her pale plainness, with her endless blue eyes, of course, an exception. Her lily patricide hands lead a small lesson in flower crowns, weaving stems and leaves together, a few children fumbling to follow along with giggles and sounds of frustration.

“Thank you!” Armin says with a dimpled smile, bowing down low for one of the little boys to plop his knotted wreath of foxglove and pale blue Jakov’s ladders atop his blond hair. Eren knows that look on his face. It is the way he looks when he’s peering into childhood again. _We’re the soldiers now_ …

“Thanks,” Eren mumbles, too, dropped to his haunches as a little girl with sloppy auburn plaits affixes her flower crown on his head. Surprisingly, she is better at braiding wreaths of flowers than she is at braiding her own hair. “You just lost a tooth, huh?” Eren asks, not sure if he should pat her on the head or the shoulder or not at all. She nods, meek but alert. “I lose mine, too — ”

The little girl grabs him by the face and starts to poke around in his mouth for proof. “Nuh-uh!” she insists. “They’re all there!”

Eren shakes her off, pouting. “That’s because they grow back!”

Historia exchanges a look with Armin; suddenly they are laughing, a sound like gold. Eren scowls up at them, perplexed. “What?” he says. “What did I say? Hey, kid, can you make me another wreath?”

It has been two months since the crowning of Historia Reiss; the cities have not yet fully accepted the change, as change is difficult. But even with lingering distrust for a semi-military administration and continued control of the Walls, morale and general support is on the rise with every day that passes.

Eren finds Jean sitting behind the small mound of donations from the city waiting to be taken in to the buildings, leaning back against a stack of crates like a king in his own personal fortress.

Fingers stinging from the cold but body warm from the exertion of toting supplies across the long stretch between fence and farm, Eren sets the second flower crown the girl with the missing tooth made for him on Jean’s head before plopping down beside him, wrapping his arms around loosely drawn-up knees, heels pressed into the crunching grass.

Jean blinks a few times, confused. He squints at Eren’s flower crown to understand what has just been placed atop his own head.

“Cute,” he says, sly glance and little perk of a smirk.

Eren blushes faintly, with pinch of a pout and roll of the eyes. “One of the kids made them.” 

It has been two months, and they still have not spoken of it. Not _truly_. Of the coup. The glowing caverns below the chapel. Two months and the regular moments stolen alone, blissful moments but bruised by the weight of too many words yet undeclared, so many questions lingering unasked. Maybe that is one of their joint flaws. Children scream and play behind them, and across the road, birds swoop from tree to tree.

 _I don’t matter. Just kill me. None of it matters. I just want to die_.

Jean’s face is rosied from the bite of the almost-winter air; he sits cross-legged with arms crossed tight to hug his coat closed, ribbed collar popped. Under the flower crown, his ash blond hair is a bit longer now, grown-out undercut a little more like a shaggy Utopian cut. It makes him look so much older already, throat thickening into a man’s though youth still clings to the other corners of his face, his bright hazel eyes.

“It feels so insignificant, doesn’t it?” he says after a moment.

“What?”  
“Us,” Jean husks, brow knotting as he just looks at Eren with defenses down and a white flag raised.

Ah. Right. They have not spoken of that, either. The cabin.

 _Insignificant_. Eren’s face scrunches up. He frowns, plucking at some blades of grass to roll down into smears of green between thumb and forefinger. “Uh. No. Not to me.”

“I just mean — you know, in the grand scheme of things. Us, coming together, then falling apart.”

Eren folds blades of grass into tiny, sharp squares, flicking them at Jean. Jean gives him an unamused glance, a little flick of his brow.

“And coming back together again?” Eren prompts, raising his brows, as that is a pretty crucial part Jean omitted there.

Jean does not meet his searching glance. He just smiles absently, rocking back with a little shrug and flag of the fingers. It means _Yes, back together again_. Hiatus between jacking each other off behind the stables outside the mountain cabin and the exorcism of pointless drama when Jean hit him across the face atop Wall Rose.  

 _You love me, and you know it_.  

Not that they’ve ever really been _apart_.

Eren doesn’t know if he could stand that, actually.

He peeks around the supplies to make sure no one is looking for them.

“How have you been? For real, Eren.”

There it is. The unspoken is spoken. How has he been, since the church. The underground cavern. The truth.

Eren shrugs, clearing his throat of the sudden chalkiness that coats it, dries his mouth, holds his breath hostage a moment.

“For real?” he echoes.

“For real,” Jean whispers.

He is not okay. He is _coping_.

“I’m scared that one day I won’t know whose memories I’m remembering,” Eren whispers back.

He can feel Jean’s eyes burning into him, the low rustling embers of his love, whatever kind of helpless love it is. Obsession or possession or consecration. Eren doesn’t care. As long as it’s anything but pity.

“Historia’s so much stronger than me,” he mumbles. “I’ve always thought, you know, either you’re powerful or you’re weak. You get up, or you lay down and die. There’s no in between. I thought she was the weak one. But it’s me — ”

The words dissolve into a strangled little sound of surprise as Jean shoves him over, a firm palm at the shoulder. Eren falls down to one side in the grass, catching himself on an elbow and shooting Jean a disgruntled look.

“No,” Jean says, hazel eyes sparking, and somehow the ghost of a frown makes Eren feel more ashamed than an actual frown of reprimand. “You’re not weak. You’ve never been weak.”

Eren scowls, defensively. Flustered and embarrassed. “Okay. I’m sorry … ”

“That’s such bullshit. Didn’t I tell you on the Wall to — ”

“ _Okay_ , Jean.” Eren just lays there on his elbow, wreath of flowers knocked gently askew at the crown of his head, a few petals shaken loose and tickling his ear.

“Damn,” he breathes after a moment, with a swell of admiration in the pit of his chest. “You’ve changed.”

Jean squints at him reproachfully like he is frustrated Eren forces him to face that truth. Like he is still slightly afraid of it — or maybe because he is not. “Yeah,” he husks. “And it’s your fault.”

Eren grins, a little tongue-between-the-teeth smile, peering at Jean through his lashes.

The grass rustles as Jean rolls to his hip, hand reaching — closes Eren’s upper arm in his grip and pulls him into a kiss. Perfect, practiced shift of the mouths, supple sealing into place of shared scars and different scars. Tip of the head. Bump of the nose. The sweet heat of it, the life burning in Jean’s lips … the hum of breath …

There is the sound of whispering footsteps in the grass; they separate and as Jean’s eyes dart past Eren to their new company, he shakes off the moment like cobwebs, hiding everything a bit better than Eren would like to see after the last three months.

“Oh — ” Armin stops short at the corner of the supplies, rears back with a stutter of a laugh. “You guys scared the shit out of me, I didn’t even know you were there.”

Jean hoists himself to his feet and shoves his hands in his pockets. “Sorry. Eren was just slacking off.”

Eren glares at him from where he sits moodily against a stack of foodstuffs. “No, you were just having an existential crisis because you’re stupid and call _me_ the oblivious one.”

Armin shrugs, raises his brows, running his hands through his hair to tuck messily behind his ears. His flower crown is gone. Masterfully, Jean redirects the conversation, nodding off in the direction of Historia and the kids. “You know, she’s not the queen I expected her to be.”

Armin nods, turning to watch with his hands on his hips. “Yeah … you know what they call her? The ‘cattle-farming goddess.’”

“Goddess, huh?” Jean laughs. “At this rate, no one’s going to remember who plugged the hole in Wall Maria, eh?”

“Yeah, well, Historia doesn’t want to _fight_ ,” Eren says, huffing a breath at another fallen petal that dusts his nose, tickles it. “This is what she’s wanted. To find people in trouble, and save them — ”

“ _Hey!_ ” Historia’s voice carries on the little wind sweeping across the farm as she makes her way over to them. “The sun’s going to set soon, we need to get this stuff inside!”

“She found us,” Armin mumbles, but happily scrapes up a crate of potatoes.

“She’s starting to remind me of my mother,” Jean says below his breath, and flashes Eren a secret glance and raise of the brows as he throws a sack of grains over one shoulder and follows Armin off. Eren twists around to peek past the pile of supplies. Sasha’s caught in the cluster of kids; Mikasa is on her way back with the wind blowing in her hair, her long coat. Eren’s eyes slide up to meet Historia’s, where she leans against a few crates giving him a look like his mother used to give him when _she_ caught him skipping chores.

“What are you going to do?” she murmurs, and her voice always flattens like this when it’s just the two of them. As if they share some secret together, something no one else can ever fathom. And, maybe, they do in a way.

“What do you mean?” Eren murmurs back, brow knotting.

“If you ever meet Reiner and Berthold again.”

Eren’s heart sinks slowly, lodges in the pit of his chest as he droops, hands falling still in his lap. Just hearing their names sparks adrenaline in his nerves, springs the taste of metal to his tongue. He looks up at her grimly, so she knows he resents her bringing it up.

“ _When_ ,” he corrects her. “And I’m going to kill them.”

Historia is quiet a moment, loose blonde hair dancing about her temple and ears. She looks sad, almost. Disappointed, but not disapproving. “You want to kill them?”

He doesn’t understand why she looks so gloomy about what he said. Neither of them are playing a role given to them anymore. Or … they could be.

Eren shakes his head, grabbing an edge of one of the crates to pull himself to his feet. He does not look at her. He looks through her, past her, at the way the drifting sun fills Mikasa’s face with light, the way Sasha threw down supplies to play with the kids, the way Armin and Jean walk shoulder to shoulder, little figures halfway to the main buildings moving in all the ways that mean talking and intimate laughter.

 _I love you_.

_You want to kill them?_

“I have to,” Eren husks.

 

**end ch. v.**


End file.
